Research Of Microfluidic Chip For Establishing Cell Microenvironment In Vitro

Microfluidic device has been an emerging technology for analytical chemistry since 1990 s.With the development of technologies,many functionalized microfluidic devices have been applied in various fields,such as individualized medicine,drug screening and mimicking organs in vitro.Cell microenvironment has intimate relationship to most cell behaviors.So many researches pay much more attention on it,especially tumor microenvironment and stem cell microenvironment.Due to rapid cells proliferation,hypoxia is an obvious character in tumor microenvironment.But traditional methods can't realize accurately control gaseous condition for tumor cell culture.EB is a spheroid of stem cells.The size of EBs determines the fate of stem cells differentiation.However,it is difficult to culture the EBs with uniform size by present handing droplet technology.To overcome the deficiency of these traditional methods,we provide new ideas by microfluidic devices.Firstly,we developed a multiple-channel array chip with controllable oxygen tensions.Oxygen tension is controlled by concentration of reagent and react rate.Any desirable oxygen condition in tumor microenvironment could be established for high throughput drug screening.Secondly,stable oxygen gradient was generated from 0.1% to 20.9% for mimicking oxygen environment needed by tumor angiogenesis.Both two methods are controlled by constant flow.Thereby,we try to use interval flow generate synchronous droplet for generating EBs with uniform size.The size of EBs is controlled by size of commercial needles.The device successfully conquers the tremendous operation in traditional methods and reduces time cost.It shows excellent viability of EBs with uniform size,which has potential to control stem cell differentiation.