Animal cell technology is a discipline of growing importance, which aims not merely to understand structure, function and behaviour of differentiated animal cells, but especially to understand the development of their abilities useful for clinical application. Topics of interest in this regard include: viral vaccines, pharmaceutical proteins and novel applications such as gene therapy and organ culture. These proceedings of the joint Meeting of the European Society for Animal Cell Technology and the Japanese Association for Animal Cell Technology (Veldhoven, The Netherlands, September 1994) review the status of the field, and should be valuable to anyone actively involved in the culture of animal cells and its applications. The text should be useful to all biologists, biochemists, molecular biologists, immunologists, virologists and all other disciplines related to animal cell technology, working in an academic environment, as well as in (biotechnology or pharmaceutical) industry.