Shock waves nowadays are well known for their regenerative effects. Basic research findings showed that shock waves do cause a biological stimulus to target cells or tissue without any subsequent damage. Therefore, in vitro experiments are of increasing interest. Various methods of applying shock waves onto cell cultures have been described. In general, all existing models focus on how to best ...

The West Nile virus was cultivated in suspended cell culture media employing several different tissue components, and it has been observed to survive in culture for at least 32 days. Continued propagation of the virus in vitro resulted in a change in its pathogenicity. The change lay in a marked reduction or a complete loss of the ability of the virus to produce fatal infections in mice and in ...

A presentation of techniques for organ culture and an evaluation of the effects of organ culture on human and animal corneas is presented. The gross and microscopic appearance of cultured corneas, phase contrast microscopic study, and histopathology of organ-cultured corneas are discussed. These obseivations show that corneas can be stored in organ culture and that after prolonged in vitro pres...

Cell culture technologies form the basis of most alternative methods. They have matured over the last decades, but severe limitations remain, which – to say it positively – leave room for improvement. This second article of the Food for Thought series wants to raise awareness of current limitations that impact on the predictive value of test systems based on cell cultures. The critical question...

A plethora of 3D and microfluidics-based culture models have been demonstrated in the recent years with the ultimate aim to facilitate predictive in vitro models for pharmaceutical development. This article summarizes to date the progress in the microfluidics-based tissue culture models, including organ-on-a-chip and vasculature-on-a-chip. Specific focus is placed on addressing the question of ...

Primary neuronal cell culture is a powerful research tool for studies of cellular and molecular neurobiology, and the development of methods for manipulating DNA expression has provided new opportunities to exploit these in vitro models for mechanistic studies. However, because of the specialized equipment and training required to set up primary neuronal cell cultures of consistently high quali...