The interface between a tumour and the adjacent stroma is a site of great importance for tumour development. At this site, carcinoma cells are highly proliferative, undergo invasive phenotypic changes, and directly interact with surrounding stromal cells, such as cancer-associated fibroblasts (CAFs) and immune cells, which further exert pro-tumourigenic effects. Here we describe the development of two tissue engineered platforms to probe these interactions: GLAnCE (Gels for Live Analysis of Compartmentalized Environments), an easy-to-use hydrogel-culture platform for investigating CAF-tumour cell interactions in vitro at a tumour-stroma interface, and TRACER a scaffold-based strategy that enables isolation of cells from specific regions within the tumour microenvironment to probe how cell-cell interactions and functions vary across gradients of microenvironmental factors such as oxygen.