Screening out irrelevant cell-based models of disease

Traditional cell-based disease models often fail to adequately represent key disease characteristics, increasing the risk of subsequent attrition in clinical trials. This article presents a set of principles for disease-relevant assays, and discusses new opportunities for exploiting advances in cell-based assay technologies in drug discovery, including induced pluripotent stem cells as well as 3D co-culture and organ-on-a-chip systems, which are being complemented by progress with single-cell imaging and gene editing technologies.