In Vitro Reconstructed Human Epithelial Models for Microbial Infection Research: Why Do We Need them?

In the last 50 years, the Replacement, Reduction and Refinement principles have become a framework for conducting high quality academic, pre-clinical, clinical and industrial research experimentation studies, in order to respond to the European Union legislative demand of alternatives to animal-based experimentation, often difficult to translate to human applications, expensive and not ethically approved. Thanks to the improvement of cellular isolation protocols, culture and co-culture conditions, together with the increased clinical demand, several novel in vitro three-dimensional tissue engineered human epithelial models, able to create sophisticate pre-clinical tests and produce results more reliable than the traditional bi-dimensional flat cell culture systems, have been developing also for microbial infection research purposes.