‘Lab-on-a-chip’ for cell engineering: towards cellular models mimicking in vivo

One of the main scopes of modern cell engineering is development of cellular models that can replace animals in drug screening and toxicological tests, so called alternative methods. Construction of the alternative model is a very challenging task due to a richness of factors creating the in vivo environment. The monolayer cell culture — cultivation of adhesive cells on artificial surfaces such as glass or polymer — lack most of the in vivo-like interactions, but still is the only tool for the majority of applications. One of the most prospective approaches on mimicking in vivo environment is “Lab-on-a-chip” technology. Microfluidic devices offer lots of advantages over traditional in vitro culture, e.g. much higher cell volume-to-extracellular fluid volume ratio or possibility of regulation of hydrodynamic stress. This presentation aims to introduce latest advances of our team in microfluidic cell culture devices. Our novel approach is to cultivate three dimensional multicellular aggregates (spheroids) in microenvironments arranged in a microfluidic system. The geometry and materials of the system allow for cultivation, observation and analysis of multicellular spheroids. The results presented concern multicellular tumor spheroids (MCTS) rising from human cancer cells, which are considered to represent most of the conditionings of cancer tumor in vivo. The fully developed MCTS microdevice will be a reliable tool for anticancer drug screening, as the results most likely will be in a close accordance with the results obtained in vivo