Fig. 1: Experimental setups.

a Birds’-eye view of the three main tumouroid setups used with the respective cellular populations in the ACM and stroma. For all setups, an ACM was nested into a stromal compartment. Both consisted of 10% monomeric collagen type 1 that had undergone plastic compression with the RAFT^TM protocol. The stroma was either acellular containing only laminin, healthy, containing HDFs and HUVECs, or cancerous containing one of six patient-specific CAF samples. A schematic was created using Servier Medical Art according to a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License guidelines 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Adjustments and colour changes were made to the original cartoons. (b) The “CAF Treatment” set-up. Tumouroids with a normal HDF-containing stroma were left to mature for 21 days to allow endothelial networks to form as previously observed.¹⁹ After this time, one of three patient-specific CAF samples were applied to the mature tumouroids.