An on-chip cell culturing and combinatorial drug screening system

Abstract

A low-cost, convenient and precise drug combination screening microfluidic platform is developed, in which cell culture chambers designed with micropillars integrate with three laminar flow diffusion channels. This platform has several distinct features, including minimum shear stress on cells, biocompatibility, optimum concentration distribution and automatic combinatorial gradient generation, which can potentially speed up the discovery of an effective drug combination for cancer ablations. The presented device can generate two-drug combination gradients at the optimum flow rate of 90 μL/h and can be applied to identify the optimal combination of two clinically relevant chemotherapy drugs. For demonstration, paclitaxel at 0.77 × 10−3 mg/mL and cisplatin at 0.23 × 10−4 mg/mL were studied against lung cancer cells (A549). This microfluidic device has the potential to provide a precise and robust screening for anticancer combinational drugs practiced in clinics.