Table 1.

Methods of 3D prostate cancer (PCa) cell culture.

Method	Advantages	Concerns	Ref.
Suspension cell cultures	Simple, low-cost, consistent yield, suitable for multicellular spheroids	Difficult control of spheroid size, lack of extracellular matrix surrogates, not suitable for migration/invasion or cell viability assays	[12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19]
Hanging drop	Low-cost, uniform spheroids	Labor-intensive, difficult medium exchange, lack of extracellular matrix surrogates, not suitable for migration/invasion or cell viability assays	[21]
Microfluidic devices	Uniform spheroids, control of spheroid size, fast spheroid formation, constant perfusion, uniform distribution of oxygen and nutrients	Specialized equipment and expertise, expensive, labor-intensive	[23]
Gel-embedding	Extracellular matrix-mimics, suitable for migration/invasion assays, wide variety of polymers	Undefined composition of natural gels, structural modification over time, labor-intensive	[24,25,26,27,28,29]
Scaffolds	High tissue mimics, wide variety of materials with wide variety of properties	Expensive, labor-intensive, possible variability between scaffolds	[30,31,32]
Patient-derived explants	High tissue mimics, direct assessment of patients’ therapeutic responses	Reliance on fresh tissue, specialized equipment and expertise, labor-intensive	[33,34,35,36,37,38]