Use of Organ Explant and Cell Culture in Cancer Research

Cell culture and organ culture are often combined into a more general term “tissue culture”. Organ culture refers to the three-dimensional multicellular, multi-tissue in vitro growth of sections or pieces (expiants) of organs which retains at least some of the histologic structural integrity of the tissue from which it was taken. Expiant organ culture contains therefore the multiple cell types that are the components of the tissue from which the expiants are resected. In the case of hamster pancreatic organ/explant culture (17) the expiants in vitro are composed of differentiated pancreatic acinar, ductal, islet, endothelial, adipose, fibroblastic, and other connective tissue cells. Cell culture, however, refers to the growth of dispersed, disaggregated single cells of a single cell type (e.g. ductal cells, endothelial). These cells do not necessarily retain the histologic structural relationships of the cells and tissues from which they were removed. Removal and isolation is achieved by enzymatic, chemical, mechanical or physical separation of the cells.