Microgravity in Tissue Engineering:Unique Properties in Promoting Three Dimensional Growth and Assembly of Cells into Functional Tissues, The Next Future of Pharmacotoxicology and Food Research

Microgravity-derived 3-D cell constructs and tissue engineering may provide, for the future, useful tools for generating reliable model systems that couple cheapness and handiness with an increased predictive power, also fostering the integration process of data from genomics, proteomics, metabolic profiling and molecular cell biology. ''Exploiting the third dimension'' is a big challenge for the next decades in life sciences and will require a more complete integration of systems biology approaches into the design and analysis of engineered tissues. The rapid progress in the development of the new micro- and nano-technologies, together with the improvements in imaging technologies and in the establishment of standard experimental protocols, will certainly enhance the possibility of a rapid advance toward this objective.