Continuously perfused microbubble array for 3D tumor spheroid model

Three-Dimensional (3D) Tumor Spheroid Invasion Assay

Invasion of surrounding normal tissues is generally considered to be a key hallmark of malignant (as opposed to benign) tumors. For some cancers in particular (e.g., brain tumors such as glioblastoma multiforme and squamous cell carcinoma of the head and neck - SCCHN) it is a cause of severe morbidity and can be life-threatening even in the absence of distant metastases. In addition, cancers wh...

Microbubble array for on-chip worm processing

A mathematical model of glioblastoma tumor spheroid invasion in a 3d in vitro experiment

Glioblastoma, the most malignant form of brain cancer, is responsible for 23% of primary brain tumors and has extremely poor outcome. Confounding the clinical management of glioblastomas is the extreme local invasiveness of these cancer cells. The mechanisms that govern invasion are poorly understood. In order to gain insight into glioblastoma invasion, we conducted experiments on the patterns ...

Microfluidic device for primary tumor spheroid isolation

BACKGROUND Traditional two-dimensional (2-D) monolayer cell culture is vastly different from in vivo physiological conditions, which can lead to inaccurate or insufficient data in areas where response and efficacy within humans are being investigated, such as drug discovery, pathology studies, etc. Misleading results arise from two main disadvantages of monolayer cell culture. First, after seve...

Continuously perfused, non-cross-contaminating microfluidic chamber array for studying cellular responses to orthogonal combinations of matrix and soluble signals.

We present a microfluidic cell culture array with unique versatility and parallelization for experimental trials requiring perfusion cultures. Specifically, we realize a rectangular chamber array in a PDMS device with three attributes: (i) continuous perfusion; (ii) flow paths that forbid cross-chamber contamination; and (iii) chamber shielding from direct perfusion to minimize shear-induced ce...