Research On Design And Application Of Microfluidic Chips For 3D Culture Of MCF-7

The cell/tissue chips based on microfluidic, also called "body-on-a-chip", culture one or several kinds of cells in the microchannels. As the chips create cell-culture microenvironments that support the cells culture for a long time in vitro, it can be well used in the drug development process. Thus, it provides a new method for cost and time-consuming conventional drug studies.In the study, a microfluidic chip for 3D culture of MCF-7 was designed and fabricated, and the chip can be used for primary drug screening experiment. The chip was fabricated in PDMS, which is non-toxic, and has good plasticity and light permeability. Through a series of experiments, we chose the double-layer structure without a porous flexible membrane and the round pool as the chip structure, to reduce the influence of the shear stress to cells. Besides, a syringe pump was used to pumpback the culture medium for perfuse. On the chip production method, the 3D printing technology was innovatively applied as it’s low cost, simple technology and rapid prototyping.The results of cell culture in chips showed that the chip can be well used in two-dimensional and three-dimensional culture of breast cancer cells (MCF-7). With the function of microfluidics, the 3D cell culture can keep 7 days or so, until form the cavity structure. The microfluidic can provide nutrition transportation for cells and eliminate wastes at the same time. In addition, when the flow rates under 50 μl/h, different fluid shear stress had little effects on cell growth in the short term, and the cell growth was similar. Moreover, in the drug screening experiment, the concentration of 0.02 μmol/ml paclitaxel was perfused in the chips. After 24 hours, the cell fluorescence images showed that paclitaxel has inhibitory effect on the three dimensional breast cancer cell growth.