Table 1.

Comparison of mono- and coculture: advantages and challenges

	Monoculture	Coculture
Spontaneous apoptosis	(−) Samples with low viability (<0.25) present a technical challenge	(+) Samples with low viability are rescued from spontaneous apoptosis
Plate-positional effects	(−) Edge effect: edge wells have systematically lower viabilities	(+) No edge effect
Reproducibility	(+) Good correlation (r = 0.92)	(+) Good correlation (r = 0.88)
Microenvironmental effects	(−) No signals from the microenvironment	(+) Ex vivo model of the bone marrow microenvironment
Drug sensitivity	(+) Drug sensitivity profiles can be used for personalized medicine (citations)	(++) Drug sensitivity profiles in presence of microenvironment signals
Drug-gene associations	(++) Many drug-gene associations are correlated with the clinical outcome	(+) Directions of drug-gene associations preserved. Lower effect size estimates. Variance reduction enhances some associations
Experimental complexity	(+) Easy to handle	(−) More labor-intense
Image analysis	(+) Straightforward	(−) Requires additional staining or machine learning to separate cancer cells from stromal cells