Having spent most of my research career on neuroblastoma, a cancer of early childhood, I’ve long seen how much the age of the tissue surrounding a tumour shapes its behaviour, and that question works in both directions. In our new review, drafted and crafted by Vanessa Farkas, Anusha Ashokan, Ronja Struck, Hannah O’Niell & Fabio Quondamatteo, we turn to the other end of the lifespan and examine how the extracellular matrix changes with ageing, and how poorly most 3D cancer models capture these changes. We propose a framework that sorts current approaches into four modelling strategies, each reproducing different features of ECM ageing and supporting a different strength of mechanistic inference. Whether you work on paediatric or adult cancers, we hope it makes the case for treating age as a defined biological variable in the models we build. Read our paper published in Materials Today Bio.
