Design and implementation of microfluidic chip to study chemotactic migration of cancer cells

Abstract

Chemotactic movement in response to drug candidates is one of the leading tangible indicators of cell's state, which has widely spread in biomedical fields ranging from normal wound healing to metastatic migration of cancer cells. To facilitate its development, a microfluidic chemotaxis chip has been designed and implemented on top of dynamic cell culture. Different from static chip confining itself to inadequate cellular functions, the microfluidic chemotaxis chip provides a more versatile alternative to enable a better compatible experimental condition forming. A soft lithography-based method is used to prepare chips from polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), which is a favourable material for manufacturing microfluidic devices. The competitive features of the chemotactic chip include a wide range of controllable flow rates, higher levels of automation, economic feasibility based on the small usage amount of material in microscale, to name but a few. In the chemotactic chip, the mixing efficiency between two inflowing liquids is finely controlled by a syringe or pressure-based pump, resulting in a chemotactic gradient that can be manipulated by adjusting the flow rate. The chip model that applied in the experiments is simulated by COMSOL Multiphysics®, which is a dominated fluidic simulation software. The final selections, such as flow rate, design, and dimension of the chip are contingent on the simulation results and empirical considerations. Finally, the chip with fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) is validated under the microscope. And the experimental data is analysed in comparison to the theoretical data computed from the simulation.