Anisotropic tumor spheroid remission with binary tumor-microenvironment-on-a-chip

Abstract

Microphysiological system (MPS) is a powerful tool for the in vitro disease validation platform. It is employed to substantially enhance understanding of tumor and their microenvironments. It aims to assist or replace preclinical studies for validating the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs, precision medicine, and investigating metastatic mechanisms. However, it still faces formidable challenges due to poor and complex usability, low yield, and limited applications for heterogeneous biological samples. Herein, we present a newly developed MPS consisting of a binary tumor-microenvironment-on-a-chip. The system is divided into two independent and separate MPS, each capable of forming a different compartment for the tumor and microenvironment via concurrent processing. These individually formed compartments can be interconnected whenever needed through simple mechanical compression, resulting in a fully integrated tumor-microenvironment-on-a-chip system. This interconnected system enables precise validation of drug efficacy and can be easily separated to retrieve the finished reaction sample for further downstream analysis. In this study, we also propose anisotropic tumor remission by forced convection phenomenon.