Drug screening of cancer cell lines and human primary tumors using droplet microfluidics

Utilization of Microfluidic Droplet-Based Methods in Diagnosis and Treatment Methods of Hepatocellular Carcinoma: A Review

Hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is one of the most common cancers worldwide and is associated with high morbidity and mortality. One of the main challenges in the management of HCC is late clinical presentation and thus diagnosis of the disease, which results in poor survival. The pathogenesis of HCC is complex and involves chronic liver injury and genetic alterations. Diagnosis of HCC can be made either by biopsy or imaging; however, conventional tissue-based biopsy methods and serological biomarkers such as AFP have limited clinical applications. While hepatocellular carcinoma is associated with a range of molecular alterations, including the activation of oncogenic signaling pathways, such as Wnt-TGFβ, PI3K-AKT-mTOR, RAS-MAPK, MET, IGF, and Wnt-β-catenin and TP53 and TERT promoter mutations, microfluidic applications have been limited. Early diagnosis is crucial for advancing treatments that would address the heterogeneity of HCC. In this context, microfluidic droplet-based methods are crucial, as they enable comprehensive analysis of the genome and transcriptome of individual cells. Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) allows the examination of individual cell transcriptomes, identifying their heterogeneity and cellular evolutionary relationships. Other microfluidic methods, such as Drop-seq, InDrop, and ATAC-seq, are also employed for single-cell analysis. Here, we examine and compare these microfluidic droplet-based methods, exploring their advantages and limitations in liver cancer research. These technologies provide new opportunities to understand liver cancer biology, diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis, contributing to scientific efforts in combating this challenging disease.

Live cell pool and rare cell isolation using Enrich TROVO system

Although several technologies have been developed to isolate cells of interest from a heterogenous sample, clogging and impaired cell viability limit such isolation. We have developed the Enrich TROVO system as a novel, nonfluidic technology to sort live cells. The TROVO system combines imaging-based cell selection and photo-crosslinking of (gelatin methacrylate) gelMA-hydrogel to capture cells. After capture, cells are released by enzymatic digestion of the hydrogel and then retrieved for downstream analysis or further cell culturing. The system can capture cells with a recovery rate of 48% while maintaining 90% viability. Moreover, TROVO can enrich rare cells 506-fold with 93% efficiency using single step isolation from a 1:104 cell mixture, and can also capture one target cell from 1 million cells, reaching an enrichment ratio of 9128. In addition, 100% purity and 49% recovery rate can be achieved by a following negative isolation process. Compared to existing technologies, the TROVO system is clog-resistant, highly biocompatible, and can process a wide range of sample sizes.

Drug screening on digital microfluidics for cancer precision medicine

Drug screening based on in-vitro primary tumor cell culture has demonstrated potential in personalized cancer diagnosis. However, the limited number of tumor cells, especially from patients with early stage cancer, has hindered the widespread application of this technique. Hence, we developed a digital microfluidic system for drug screening using primary tumor cells and established a working protocol for precision medicine. Smart control logic was developed to increase the throughput of the system and decrease its footprint to parallelly screen three drugs on a 4 × 4 cm2 chip in a device measuring 23 × 16 × 3.5 cm3. We validated this method in an MDA-MB-231 breast cancer xenograft mouse model and liver cancer specimens from patients, demonstrating tumor suppression in mice/patients treated with drugs that were screened to be effective on individual primary tumor cells. Mice treated with drugs screened on-chip as ineffective exhibited similar results to those in the control groups. The effective drug identified through on-chip screening demonstrated consistency with the absence of mutations in their related genes determined via exome sequencing of individual tumors, further validating this protocol. Therefore, this technique and system may promote advances in precision medicine for cancer treatment and, eventually, for any disease.

Spheroids and organoids derived from colorectal cancer as tools for in vitro drug screening

Colorectal cancer (CRC) is a heterogeneous disease. Conventional two-dimensional (2D) culture employing cell lines was developed to study the molecular properties of CRC in vitro. Although these cell lines which are isolated from the tumor niche in which cancer develop, the translation to human model such as studying drug response is often hindered by the inability of cell lines to recapture original tumor features and the lack of heterogeneous clinical tumors represented by this 2D model, differed from in vivo condition. These limitations which may be overcome by utilizing three-dimensional (3D) culture consisting of spheroids and organoids. Over the past decade, great advancements have been made in optimizing culture method to establish spheroids and organoids of solid tumors including of CRC for multiple purposes including drug screening and establishing personalized medicine. These structures have been proven to be versatile and robust models to study CRC progression and deciphering its heterogeneity. This review will describe on advances in 3D culture technology and the application as well as the challenges of CRC-derived spheroids and organoids as a mode to screen for anticancer drugs.

Flexible Toolbox of High-Precision Microfluidic Modules for Versatile Droplet-Based Applications

Although the enormous potential of droplet-based microfluidics has been successfully demonstrated in the past two decades for medical, pharmaceutical, and academic applications, its inherent potential has not been fully exploited until now. Nevertheless, the cultivation of biological cells and 3D cell structures like spheroids and organoids, located in serially arranged droplets in micro-channels, has a range of benefits compared to established cultivation techniques based on, e.g., microplates and microchips. To exploit the enormous potential of the droplet-based cell cultivation technique, a number of basic functions have to be fulfilled. In this paper, we describe microfluidic modules to realize the following basic functions with high precision: (i) droplet generation, (ii) mixing of cell suspensions and cell culture media in the droplets, (iii) droplet content detection, and (iv) active fluid injection into serially arranged droplets. The robustness of the functionality of the Two-Fluid Probe is further investigated regarding its droplet generation using different flow rates. Advantages and disadvantages in comparison to chip-based solutions are discussed. New chip-based modules like the gradient, the piezo valve-based conditioning, the analysis, and the microscopy module are characterized in detail and their high-precision functionalities are demonstrated. These microfluidic modules are micro-machined, and as the surfaces of their micro-channels are plasma-treated, we are able to perform cell cultivation experiments using any kind of cell culture media, but without needing to use surfactants. This is even more considerable when droplets are used to investigate cell cultures like stem cells or cancer cells as cell suspensions, as 3D cell structures, or as tissue fragments over days or even weeks for versatile applications.

Progress in Programmable DNA-Aided Self-Assembly of the Master Frame of a Drug Delivery System

Every year cancer causes approximately 10 million deaths globally. Researchers have developed numerous targeted drug delivery systems (DDSs) with nanoparticles, polymers, and liposomes, but these synthetic materials have poor degradability and low biocompatibility. Because DNA nanostructures have good degradability and high biocompatibility, extensive studies have been performed to construct DDSs with DNA nanostructures as the molecular-layer master frame (MF) assembled via programmable DNA-aided self-assembly for targeted drug release. To learn the progressing trend of self-assembly techniques and keep pace with their recent rapid advancements, it is crucial to provide an overview of their past and recent progress. In this review article, we first present the techniques to assemble the MF of a DDS with solely DNA strands; to assemble MFs with one or more additional type of construction materials, e.g., polymers (including RNA and protein), inorganic nanoparticle, or metal ions, in addition to DNA strands; and to assemble the more complex DNA nanocomplexes. It is observed that both the techniques used and the MFs constructed have become increasingly complex and that the DDS constructed has an increasing number of advanced functions. From our focused review, we anticipate that DDSs with the MF of multiple building materials and DNA nanocomplexes will attract an increasing number of researchers' interests. On the basis of knowledge about materials and functional components (e.g., targeting aptamers/peptides/antibodies and stimuli for drug release) obtained from previously performed studies, researchers can combine more materials with DNA strands to assemble more powerful MFs and incorporate more components to endow DDSs with improved or additional properties/functions, thereby subsequently contributing to cancer prevention.

Multiomic Investigations into Lung Health and Disease

Diseases of the lung account for more than 5 million deaths worldwide and are a healthcare burden. Improving clinical outcomes, including mortality and quality of life, involves a holistic understanding of the disease, which can be provided by the integration of lung multi-omics data. An enhanced understanding of comprehensive multiomic datasets provides opportunities to leverage those datasets to inform the treatment and prevention of lung diseases by classifying severity, prognostication, and discovery of biomarkers. The main objective of this review is to summarize the use of multiomics investigations in lung disease, including multiomics integration and the use of machine learning computational methods. This review also discusses lung disease models, including animal models, organoids, and single-cell lines, to study multiomics in lung health and disease. We provide examples of lung diseases where multi-omics investigations have provided deeper insight into etiopathogenesis and have resulted in improved preventative and therapeutic interventions.

Selectable encapsulated cell quantity in droplets via label-free electrical screening and impedance-activated sorting

Single-cell encapsulation in droplets has become a powerful tool in immunotherapy, medicine discovery, and single-cell analysis, thanks to its capability for cell confinement in picoliter volumes. However, the purity and throughput of single-cell droplets are limited by random encapsulation process, which resuts in a majority of empty and multi-cells droplets. Herein we introduce the first label-free selectable cell quantity encapsulation in droplets sorting system to overcome this problem. The system utilizes a simple and reliable electrical impedance based screening (98.9% of accuracy) integrated with biocompatible acoustic sorting to select single-cell droplets, achieving 90.3% of efficiency and up to 200 ​Hz of throughput, by removing multi-cells (∼60% of rejection) and empty droplets (∼90% of rejection). We demonstrate the use of the droplet sorting to improve the throughput of single-cell encapsulation by ∼9-fold compared to the conventional random encapsulation process.

A home-made pipette droplet microfluidics rapid prototyping and training kit for digital PCR, microorganism/cell encapsulation and controlled microgel synthesis

Droplet microfluidics offers a platform from which new digital molecular assay, disease screening, wound healing and material synthesis technologies have been proposed. However, the current commercial droplet generation, assembly and imaging technologies are too expensive and rigid to permit rapid and broad-range tuning of droplet features/cargoes. This rapid prototyping bottleneck has limited further expansion of its application. Herein, an inexpensive home-made pipette droplet microfluidics kit is introduced. This kit includes elliptical pipette tips that can be fabricated with a simple DIY (Do-It-Yourself) tool, a unique tape-based or 3D printed shallow-center imaging chip that allows rapid monolayer droplet assembly/immobilization and imaging with a smart-phone camera or miniature microscope. The droplets are generated by manual or automatic pipetting without expensive and lab-bound microfluidic pumps. The droplet size and fluid viscosity/surface tension can be varied significantly because of our particular droplet generation, assembly and imaging designs. The versatility of this rapid prototyping kit is demonstrated with three representative applications that can benefit from a droplet microfluidic platform: (1) Droplets as microreactors for PCR reaction with reverse transcription to detect and quantify target RNAs. (2) Droplets as microcompartments for spirulina culturing and the optical color/turbidity changes in droplets with spirulina confirm successful photosynthetic culturing. (3) Droplets as templates/molds for controlled synthesis of gold-capped polyacrylamide/gold composite Janus microgels. The easily fabricated and user-friendly portable kit is hence ideally suited for design, training and educational labs.

Microphysiological Drug-Testing Platform for Identifying Responses to Prodrug Treatment in Primary Leukemia

Despite increasing survival rates of pediatric leukemia patients over the past decades, the outcome of some leukemia subtypes has remained dismal. Drug sensitivity and resistance testing on patient-derived leukemia samples provide important information to tailor treatments for high-risk patients. However, currently used well-based drug screening platforms have limitations in predicting the effects of prodrugs, a class of therapeutics that require metabolic activation to become effective. To address this issue, a microphysiological drug-testing platform is developed that enables co-culturing of patient-derived leukemia cells, human bone marrow mesenchymal stromal cells, and human liver microtissues within the same microfluidic platform. This platform also enables to control the physical interaction between the diverse cell types. Herein, it is made possible to recapitulate hepatic prodrug activation of ifosfamide in their platform, which is very difficult in traditional well-based assays. By testing the susceptibility of primary patient-derived leukemia samples to the prodrug ifosfamide, sample-specific sensitivities to ifosfamide in primary leukemia samples are identified. The microfluidic platform is found to enable the recapitulation of physiologically relevant conditions and the testing of prodrugs including short-lived and unstable metabolites. The platform holds great potential for clinical translation and precision chemotherapy selection.

Microfluidic-based dynamic BH3 profiling predicts anticancer treatment efficacy

Precision medicine is starting to incorporate functional assays to evaluate anticancer agents on patient-isolated tissues or cells to select for the most effective. Among these new technologies, dynamic BH3 profiling (DBP) has emerged and extensively been used to predict treatment efficacy in different types of cancer. DBP uses synthetic BH3 peptides to measure early apoptotic events ('priming') and anticipate therapy-induced cell death leading to tumor elimination. This predictive functional assay presents multiple advantages but a critical limitation: the cell number requirement, that limits drug screening on patient samples, especially in solid tumors. To solve this problem, we developed an innovative microfluidic-based DBP (µDBP) device that overcomes tissue limitations on primary samples. We used microfluidic chips to generate a gradient of BIM BH3 peptide, compared it with the standard flow cytometry based DBP, and tested different anticancer treatments. We first examined this new technology's predictive capacity using gastrointestinal stromal tumor (GIST) cell lines, by comparing imatinib sensitive and resistant cells, and we could detect differences in apoptotic priming and anticipate cytotoxicity. We then validated µDBP on a refractory GIST patient sample and identified that the combination of dactolisib and venetoclax increased apoptotic priming. In summary, this new technology could represent an important advance for precision medicine by providing a fast, easy-to-use and scalable microfluidic device to perform DBP in situ as a routine assay to identify the best treatment for cancer patients.

A microfluidic Braille valve platform for on-demand production, combinatorial screening and sorting of chemically distinct droplets

Droplet microfluidics is a powerful tool for a variety of biological applications including single-cell genetics, antibody discovery and directed evolution. All these applications make use of genetic libraries, illustrating the difficulty of generating chemically distinct droplets for screening applications. This protocol describes our Braille Display valving platform for on-demand generation of droplets with different chemical contents (16 different reagents and combinations thereof), as well as sorting droplets with different chemical properties, on the basis of fluorescence signals. The Braille Display platform is compact, versatile and cost efficient (only ~US$1,000 on top of a standard droplet microfluidics setup). The procedure includes manufacturing of microfluidic chips, assembly of custom hardware, co-encapsulation of cells and drugs into droplets, fluorescence detection of readout signals and data analysis using shared, freely available LabVIEW and Python packages. As a first application, we demonstrate the complete workflow for screening cancer cell drug sensitivities toward 74 conditions. Furthermore, we describe here an assay enabling the normalization of the observed drug sensitivity to the number of cancer cells per droplet, which additionally increases the robustness of the system. As a second application, we also demonstrate the sorting of droplets according to enzymatic activity. The drug screening application can be completed within 2 d; droplet sorting takes ~1 d; and all preparatory steps for manufacturing molds, chips and setting up the Braille controller can be accomplished within 1 week.

CO2-Laser-Micromachined, Polymer Microchannels with a Degassed PDMS slab for the Automatic Production of Monodispersed Water-in-Oil Droplets

In our recent study, we fabricated a pump/tube-connection-free microchip comprising top and bottom polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) slabs to produce monodispersed water-in-oil droplets in a fully automated, fluid-manipulation fashion. All microstructures required for droplet production were directly patterned on the surfaces of the two PDMS slabs through CO2-laser micromachining, facilitating the fast fabrication of the droplet-production microchips. In the current extension study, we replaced the bottom PDMS slab, which served as a microfluidic layer in the microchip, with a poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) slab. This modification was based on our idea that the bottom PDMS slab does not contribute to the automatic fluid manipulation and that replacing the bottom PDMS slab with a more affordable and accessible, ready-to-use polymer slab, such as a PMMA, would further facilitate the rapid and low-cost fabrication of the connection-free microchips. Using a new PMMA/PDMS microchip, we produced water-in-oil droplets with high degree of size-uniformity (a coefficient of variation for droplet diameters of <5%) without a decrease in the droplet production rate (~270 droplets/s) as compared with that achieved via the previous PDMS/PDMS microchip (~220 droplets/s).

Aspiletrein A Induces Apoptosis Cell Death via Increasing Reactive Oxygen Species Generation and AMPK Activation in Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Cells

Lung cancer remains a leading cause of death in cancer patients, and deregulation of apoptosis is a serious concern in clinical practice, even though therapeutic intervention has been greatly improved. Plants are a versatile source of biologically active compounds for anticancer drug discovery, and aspiletrein A (AA) is a steroidal saponin isolated from Aspidistra letreae that has a potent cytotoxic effect on various cancer cell lines. In this study, we investigated and determined the underlying molecular mechanism by which AA induces apoptosis. AA strongly induced apoptosis in NSCLC cells by mediating ROS generation and thereby activating AMP-activated protein kinase (AMPK) signaling. Consequently, downstream signaling and levels of phosphorylated mTOR and Bcl-2 were significantly decreased. Pretreatment with either an antioxidant, N-acetylcysteine, or an AMPK inhibitor, compound C, could reverse the apoptosis-inducing effect and counteract the effect of AA on the AMPK signaling pathway. Decreased levels of Bcl-2 were due to AA-mediating Bcl-2 degradation via a ROS/AMPK/mTOR axis-dependent proteasomal mechanism. Consistently, the apoptotic-inducing effect of AA was also observed in patient-derived malignant lung cancer cells, and it suppressed an in vitro 3D-tumorigenesis. This study identified the underlying mechanism of AA on lung cancer apoptosis, thereby facilitating potential research and development of this compound for further clinical implications.

FIDELITY: A quality control system for droplet microfluidics

Droplet microfluidic systems have been widely deployed to interrogate biological and chemical systems. The major limitations of these systems are the relatively high error rates from critical droplet manipulation functions. To address these limitations, we describe the development of FIDELITY (Flotation and Interdigitated electrode forces on Droplets to Enable Lasting system IntegriTY), a highly sensitive and accurate size-based droplet bandpass filter that leverages the natural buoyancy of aqueous droplets and highly localized dielectrophoretic force generated by interdigitated electrode arrays. Droplet manipulation accuracies greater than 99% were achieved at a throughput of up to 100 droplets/s and separation of droplets that differed in diameter by only 6 μm was demonstrated. Last, the utility of FIDELITY was demonstrated in a droplet size quality control application and also in a droplet-based in vitro transcription/translation workflow. We anticipate FIDELITY to be integrated into a broad range of droplet microfluidic configurations to achieve exceptional operational accuracy.

Assessment of chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cytotoxicity by droplet microfluidics in vitro

Chimeric antigen receptor T (CAR-T) cells are cytotoxic T cells engineered to specifically kill cancer cells expressing specific target receptor(s). Prior CAR-T efficacy tests include CAR expression analysis by qPCR or ELISA, in vitro measurement of interferon-γ (IFNγ) or interleukin-2 (IL-2), and xenograft models. However, the in vitro measurements did not reflect CAR-T cytotoxicity, whereas xenograft models are low throughput and costly. Here, we presented a robust in vitro droplet microfluidic assay for CAR-T cytotoxicity assessment. This method not only enabled assessment of CAR-T cytotoxic activity under different fluid viscosity conditions, but also facilitated measurement of CAR-T expansion and dissection of mechanism of action via phenotype analysis in vitro. Furthermore, our data suggested that label-free cytotoxicity analysis is feasible by acquiring data before and after treatment. Hence, this study presented a novel in vitro method for assessment of cellular cytotoxicity that could potentially be applied to any cytotoxicity experiment with varying solvent composition.

Sensitizing drug-resistant cancer cells from blood using microfluidic electroporator

Direct assessment of patient samples holds unprecedented potential in the treatment of cancer. Circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in liquid biopsies are a rapidly evolving source of primary cells in the clinic and are ideal candidates for functional assays to uncover real-time tumor information in real-time. However, a lack of routines allowing direct and active interrogation of CTCs directly from liquid biopsy samples represents a bottleneck for the translational use of liquid biopsies in clinical settings. To address this, we present a workflow for using a microfluidic vortex-assisted electroporation system designed for the functional assessment of CTCs purified from blood. Validation of this approach was assessed through drug response assays on wild-type (HCC827 wt) and gefitinib-resistant (HCC827 GR6) non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) cells. HCC827 cells trapped within microscale vortices were electroporated to sequentially deliver drug agents into the cytosol. Electroporation conditions facilitating multi-agent delivery were characterized for both cell lines using an automatic single-cell image fluorescence intensity algorithm. HCC827 GR6 cells spiked into the blood to emulate drug-resistant CTCs were able to be collected with high purity, demonstrating the ability of the device to minimize background cell impact for downstream sensitive cell assays. Using our proposed workflow, drug agent combinations to restore gefitinib sensitivity reflected the anticipated cytotoxic response. Taken together, these results represent a microfluidics multi-drug screening panel workflow that can enable functional interrogation of patient CTCs in situ, thereby accelerating the clinical standardization of liquid biopsies.

Microfluidics device for drug discovery, screening and delivery

Microfluidics and lab-on-chip are two progressive technologies widely used for drug discovery, screening and delivery. It has been designed in a way to act as a platform for sample preparations, culturing, incubation and screening through multi-channels. These devices require a small amount of reagent in about micro- to nanolitre volume. Microfluidics has the capacity to perform operations in a programmable manner and is easy to fine tune the size, shape and composition of drugs by changing flow rate and precise manipulations. Microfluidics platform comes with the advantage of mixing fluid in droplet reactors. Microfluidics is used in the field of chemistry, biomedical, biology and nanotechnology due to its high-throughput performance in various assays. It is potent enough to be used in microreactors for synthesis of particles and encapsulation of many biological entities for biological and drug delivery applications. Microfluidics therefore has the scope to be uplifted from basic to advanced diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

Cancer drug screening with an on-chip multi-drug dispenser in digital microfluidics

Microfluidics has been the most promising platform for drug screening with a limited number of cells. However, convenient on-chip preparation of a wide range of drug concentrations remains a large challenge and has restricted wide acceptance of microfluidics in precision medicine. In this paper, we report a digital microfluidic system with an innovative control structure and chip design for on-chip drug dispensing to generate concentrations that span three to four orders of magnitude, enabling single drug or combinatorial multi-drug screening with simple electronic control. Specifically, we utilize droplet ejection from a drug drop sitting on a special electrode, named a drug dispenser, under high-voltage pulse actuation to deliver the desired amount of drugs to be picked up by a cell suspension drop driven by low-voltage sine wave actuation. Our proof-of-principle validation for this technique as a convenient single and multi-drug screening involved testing of the drug toxicity of two chemotherapeutics, cisplatin (Cis) and epirubicin (EP), towards MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells and MCF-10A normal breast cells. The results are consistent with those screened based on traditional 96-well plates. These findings demonstrate the reliability of the drug screening system with an on-chip drug dispenser. This system with fewer cancer cells, less drug consumption, a small footprint, and high scalability with regard to concentration could pave the way for drug screening on biopsied primary tumor cells for precision medicine or any concentration-related research.

Versatile acoustic manipulation of micro-objects using mode-switchable oscillating bubbles: transportation, trapping, rotation, and revolution

Controllable on-chip multimodal manipulation of micro-objects in microfluidic devices is urgently required for enhancing the efficiency of potential biomedical applications. However, fixed design and driving models make it difficult to achieve switchable multifunction efficiently in a single device. In this study, a versatile bubble-based acoustofluidic device is proposed for multimodal manipulation of micro-objects in a biocompatible manner. Identical bubbles trapped over the bottom microcavities are made to flexibly switch between four different oscillatory motions by varying the applied frequency to generate corresponding modes of streaming patterns in the microchannel. Such regular modes enable stable transportation, trapping, 3D rotation, and circular revolution of the micro-objects, which were experimentally and numerically verified. The mode-switchable manipulations can be noninvasively applied to particles, cells, and organisms with different sizes, shapes, and quantities and can be controlled by key driving parameters. Moreover, 3D cell reconstruction is developed by applying the out-of-plane rotational mode and analyzed for illustration of cell surface morphology while quantifying reliably basic cell properties. Finally, a simple platform is established to integrate user-friendly function control and reconstruction analysis. The mode-switchable acoustofluidic device features a versatile, controllable, and contactless micro-object manipulation method, which provides an efficient solution for biomedical applications.

Analysis of Static Molecular Gradients in a High-Throughput Drug Screening Microfluidic Assay

In this study, we thoroughly analyzed molecular gradient generation, its stability over time, and linearity in our high-throughput drug screening microfluidic assay (HTS). These parameters greatly affect the precision and accuracy of the device's analytical protocol. As part of the research, we developed a mathematical model of dependence of the concentration profile on the initial concentrations of active substances in reservoirs and the number of tilts, as well as the dependence of the active substance concentration profiles in the culture chambers on the concentration profile of the reference dye in the indicator chamber. The mean concentration prediction error of the proposed equations ranged from 1.4% to 2.4% for the optimized parameters of the procedure and did not increase with the incubation time. The concentration profile linearity index, Pearson's correlation coefficient reached -0.997 for 25 device tilts. The observed time stability of the profiles was very good. The mean difference between the concentration profile after 5 days of incubation and the baseline profile was only 7.0%. The newly created mathematical relationships became part of the new HTS biochip operating protocols, which are detailed in the article.

Accelerating precision anti-cancer therapy by time-lapse and label-free 3D tumor slice culture platform

The feasibility of personalized medicine for cancer treatment is largely hampered by costly, labor-intensive and time-consuming models for drug discovery. Herein, establishing new pre-clinical models to tackle these issues for personalized medicine is urgently demanded.

Methods: We established a three-dimensional tumor slice culture (3D-TSC) platform incorporating label-free techniques for time-course experiments to predict anti-cancer drug efficacy and validated the 3D-TSC model by multiphoton fluorescence microscopy, RNA sequence analysis, histochemical and histological analysis.

Results: Using time-lapse imaging of the apoptotic reporter sensor C3 (C3), we performed cell-based high-throughput drug screening and shortlisted high-efficacy drugs to screen murine and human 3D-TSCs, which validate effective candidates within 7 days of surgery. Histological and RNA sequence analyses demonstrated that 3D-TSCs accurately preserved immune components of the original tumor, which enables the successful achievement of immune checkpoint blockade assays with antibodies against PD-1 and/or PD-L1. Label-free multiphoton fluorescence imaging revealed that 3D-TSCs exhibit lipofuscin autofluorescence features in the time-course monitoring of drug response and efficacy.

Conclusion: This technology accelerates precision anti-cancer therapy by providing a cheap, fast, and easy platform for anti-cancer drug discovery.

Microfluidics applications for high-throughput single cell sequencing

The inherent heterogeneity of individual cells in cell populations plays significant roles in disease development and progression, which is critical for disease diagnosis and treatment. Substantial evidences show that the majority of traditional gene profiling methods mask the difference of individual cells. Single cell sequencing can provide data to characterize the inherent heterogeneity of individual cells, and reveal complex and rare cell populations. Different microfluidic technologies have emerged for single cell researches and become the frontiers and hot topics over the past decade. In this review article, we introduce the processes of single cell sequencing, and review the principles of microfluidics for single cell analysis. Also, we discuss the common high-throughput single cell sequencing technologies along with their advantages and disadvantages. Lastly, microfluidics applications in single cell sequencing technology for the diagnosis of cancers and immune system diseases are briefly illustrated.

Technological Advances in Tumor-On-Chip Technology: From Bench to Bedside

Simple Summary

Various 3D in vitro tumor models are rapidly advancing cancer research. Unlike animal models, they can be produced quickly and are amenable to high-throughput studies. Growing tumor spheroids in microfluidic tumor-on-chip platforms has particularly elevated the capabilities of such models. Tumor-on-chip devices can mimic multiple aspects of the dynamic in vivo tumor microenvironment in a precisely controlled manner. Moreover, new technologies for the on- and off-chip analysis of these tumor mimics are continuously emerging. There is thus an urgent need to review the latest developments in this rapidly progressing field. Here, we present an overview of the technological advances in tumor-on-chip technology by reviewing state-of-the-art tools for on-chip analysis. In particular, we evaluate the potential for tumor-on-chip technology to guide personalized cancer therapies. We strive to appeal to cancer researchers and biomedical engineers alike, informing on current progress, while provoking thought on the outstanding developments needed to achieve clinical-stage research.

Abstract

Tumor-on-chip technology has cemented its importance as an in vitro tumor model for cancer research. Its ability to recapitulate different elements of the in vivo tumor microenvironment makes it promising for translational medicine, with potential application in enabling personalized anti-cancer therapies. Here, we provide an overview of the current technological advances for tumor-on-chip generation. To further elevate the functionalities of the technology, these approaches need to be coupled with effective analysis tools. This aspect of tumor-on-chip technology is often neglected in the current literature. We address this shortcoming by reviewing state-of-the-art on-chip analysis tools for microfluidic tumor models. Lastly, we focus on the current progress in tumor-on-chip devices using patient-derived samples and evaluate their potential for clinical research and personalized medicine applications.

[Research advances of high-throughput cell-based drug screening systems based on microfluidic technique]

Drug screening is the process of screening new drugs or leading compounds with biological activity from natural products or synthetic compounds, and it plays an essential role in drug discovery. The discovery of innovative drugs requires the screening of a large number of compounds with appropriate drug targets. With the development of genomics, proteomics, metabolomics, combinatorial chemistry, and other disciplines, the library of drug molecules has been largely expanded, and the number of drug targets is continuously increasing. High-throughput screening systems enable the parallel analysis of thousands of reactions through automated operation, thereby enhancing the experimental scale and efficiency of drug screening. Among them, cell-based high-throughput drug screening has become the main screening mode because it can provide a microenvironment similar to human physiological conditions. However, the current high-throughput screening systems are mainly built based on multiwell plates, which have several disadvantages such as simple cell culture conditions, laborious and time-consuming operation, and high reagent consumption. In addition, it is difficult to achieve complex drug combination screening. Therefore, there is an urgent need for rapid and low-cost drug screening methods to reduce the time and cost of drug development. Microfluidic techniques, which can manipulate and control microfluids in microscale channels, have the advantages of low consumption, high efficiency, high throughput, and automation. It can overcome the shortcomings of screening systems based on multi-well plates and provide an efficient and reliable technical solution for establishing high-throughput cell-based screening systems. Moreover, microfluidic systems can be flexibly changed in terms of cell culture materials, chip structure design, and fluid control methods to enable better control and simulation of cell growth microenvironment. Operations such as cell seeding, culture medium replacement or addition, drug addition and cleaning, and cell staining reagent addition are usually involved in cell-based microfluidic screening systems. These operations are all based on the manipulation of microfluids. This paper reviews the research advances in cell-based microfluidic screening systems using different microfluidic manipulation modes, namely perfusion flow mode, droplet mode, and microarray mode. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of these systems are summarized. Moreover, the development prospects of high-throughput screening systems based on microfluidic techniques has been looked forward. Furthermore, the current problems in this field and the directions to overcome these problems are discussed.

Differential reprogramming of breast cancer subtypes in 3D cultures and implications for sensitivity to targeted therapy

Screening for effective candidate drugs for breast cancer has shifted from two-dimensional (2D) to three-dimensional (3D) cultures. Here we systematically compared the transcriptomes of these different culture conditions by RNAseq of 14 BC cell lines cultured in both 2D and 3D conditions. All 3D BC cell cultures demonstrated increased mitochondrial metabolism and downregulated cell cycle programs. Luminal BC cells in 3D demonstrated overall limited reprogramming. 3D basal B BC cells showed increased expression of extracellular matrix (ECM) interaction genes, which coincides with an invasive phenotype not observed in other BC cells. Genes downregulated in 3D were associated with metastatic disease progression in BC patients, including cyclin dependent kinases and aurora kinases. Furthermore, the overall correlation of the cell line transcriptome to the BC patient transcriptome was increased in 3D cultures for all TNBC cell lines. To define the most optimal culture conditions to study the oncogenic pathway of interest, an open source bioinformatics strategy was established.

Construction of cancer-on-a-chip for drug screening

Cancer-on-a-chip has effectively contributed to the development of drug screening, holding great promise for more convenient and reliable drug development as well as personalized drug administration.

Breast tumor-on-chip models: From disease modeling to personalized drug screening

Breast cancer is one of the leading causes of mortality worldwide being the most common cancer among women. Despite the significant progress obtained during the past years in the understanding of breast cancer pathophysiology, women continue to die from it. Novel tools and technologies are needed to develop better diagnostic and therapeutic approaches, and to better understand the molecular and cellular players involved in the progression of this disease. Typical methods employed by the pharmaceutical industry and laboratories to investigate breast cancer etiology and evaluate the efficiency of new therapeutic compounds are still based on traditional tissue culture flasks and animal models, which have certain limitations. Recently, tumor-on-chip technology emerged as a new generation of in vitro disease model to investigate the physiopathology of tumors and predict the efficiency of drugs in a native-like microenvironment. These microfluidic systems reproduce the functional units and composition of human organs and tissues, and importantly, the rheological properties of the native scenario, enabling precise control over fluid flow or local gradients. Herein, we review the most recent works related to breast tumor-on-chip for disease modeling and drug screening applications. Finally, we critically discuss the future applications of this emerging technology in breast cancer therapeutics and drug development.

The prospects of tumor chemosensitivity testing at the single-cell level

Tumor chemosensitivity testing plays a pivotal role in the optimal selection of chemotherapeutic regimens for cancer patients in a personalized manner. High-throughput drug screening approaches have been developed but they failed to take into account intratumor heterogeneity and therefore only provided limited predictive power of therapeutic response to individual cancer patients. Single cancer cell drug sensitivity testing (SCC-DST) has been recently developed to evaluate the variable sensitivity of single cells to different anti-tumor drugs. In this review, we discuss how SCC-DST overcomes the obstacles of traditional drug screening methodologies. We outline critical procedures of SCC-DST responsible for single-cell generation and sorting, cell-drug encapsulation on a microfluidic chip and detection of cell-drug interactions. In SCC-DST, droplet-based microfluidics is emerging as an important platform that integrated various assays and analyses for drug susceptibility tests for individual patients. With the advancement of technology, both fluorescence imaging and label-free analysis have been used for detecting single cell-drug interactions. We also discuss the feasibility of integrating SCC-DST with single-cell RNA sequencing to unravel the mechanisms leading to drug resistance, and utilizing artificial intelligence to facilitate the analysis of various omics data in the evaluation of drug susceptibility. SCC-DST is setting the stage for better drug selection for individual cancer patients in the era of precision medicine.

Application of an open-chamber multi-channel microfluidic device to test chemotherapy drugs

The use of precision medicine for chemotherapy requires the individualization of the therapeutic regimen for each patient. This approach improves treatment efficacy and reduces the probability of administering ineffective drugs. To ensure accurate decision-making in a timely manner, anticancer drug efficacy tests must be performed within a short timeframe using a small number of cancer cells. These requirements can be satisfied via microfluidics-based drug screening platforms, which are composed of complex fluidic channels and closed systems. Owing to their complexity, skilled manipulation is required. In this study, we developed a microfluidic platform, to accurately perform multiple drug efficacy tests using a small number of cells, which can be conducted via simple manipulation. As it is a small, open-chamber system, a minimal number of cells could be loaded through simple pipetting. Furthermore, the extracellular matrix gel inside the chamber provides an in vivo-like environment that enables the localized delivery of the drugs to spontaneously diffuse from the channels underneath the chamber without a pump, thereby efficiently and robustly testing the efficacy and resistance of multiple drugs. We demonstrated that this platform enabled the rapid and facile testing of multiple drugs using a small number of cells (~ 10,000) over a short period of time (~ 2 days). These results provide the possibility of using this powerful platform for selecting therapeutic medication, developing new drugs, and delivering personalized medicine to patients.

Droplet-Based Cytotoxicity Assay: Implementation of Time-Efficient Screening of Antitumor Activity of Natural Killer Cells

Natural killer (NK) cells are key players of the innate immune system. Due to their rapid cytotoxicity against infectious pathogens, hematologic malignancies, and solid tumors, NK cells represent solid candidates for cell-based immunotherapy. Despite the progress made in recent years, the heterogeneity in their cytotoxic behavior represents a drawback. With the goal of screening the intrinsic diversity of NK cells, droplet-based microfluidic technology is exploited to develop a single-cell time-efficient cytotoxicity assay. Toward this end, NK-92 cells are coencapsulated with hematological tumor cell lines in water-in-oil droplets of different sizes and their cytotoxic activity is evaluated. The effect of droplet-based confinement on NK cytotoxicity is investigated by controlling the droplet volume. The successful optimization of the droplet size allows for time efficiency compared to cytotoxicity assays based on flow cytometry. Additionally, the ability of individual NK-92 cells to kill multiple target cells in series is explored, expanding the knowledge about the serial killing process dynamics. The developed droplet-based microfluidic assay does not require the labeling of NK cells and represents a step toward developing of a forthcoming process for the selection of NK cells with the highest cytotoxicity against specific targets.

Toward Systems Biomarkers of Response to Immune Checkpoint Blockers

Immunotherapy with checkpoint blockers (ICBs), aimed at unleashing the immune response toward tumor cells, has shown a great improvement in overall patient survival compared to standard therapy, but only in a subset of patients. While a number of recent studies have significantly improved our understanding of mechanisms playing an important role in the tumor microenvironment (TME), we still have an incomplete view of how the TME works as a whole. This hampers our ability to effectively predict the large heterogeneity of patients' response to ICBs. Systems approaches could overcome this limitation by adopting a holistic perspective to analyze the complexity of tumors. In this Mini Review, we focus on how an integrative view of the increasingly available multi-omics experimental data and computational approaches enables the definition of new systems-based predictive biomarkers. In particular, we will focus on three facets of the TME toward the definition of new systems biomarkers. First, we will review how different types of immune cells influence the efficacy of ICBs, not only in terms of their quantification, but also considering their localization and functional state. Second, we will focus on how different cells in the TME interact, analyzing how inter- and intra-cellular networks play an important role in shaping the immune response and are responsible for resistance to immunotherapy. Finally, we will describe the potential of looking at these networks as dynamic systems and how mathematical models can be used to study the rewiring of the complex interactions taking place in the TME.

Microfluidics as an Enabling Technology for Personalized Cancer Therapy

Tailoring patient-specific treatments for cancer is necessary in order to achieve optimal results but requires new diagnostic approaches at affordable prices. Microfluidics has immense potential to provide solutions for this, as it enables the processing of samples that are not available in large quantities (e.g., cells from patient biopsies), is cost efficient, provides a high level of automation, and allows the set-up of complex models for cancer studies. In this review, individual solutions in the fields of genetics, circulating tumor cell monitoring, biomarker analysis, phenotypic drug sensitivity tests, and systems providing controlled environments for disease modeling are discussed. An overview on how these early stage achievements can be combined or developed further is showcased, and the required translational steps before microfluidics becomes a routine tool for clinical applications are critically discussed.

Enteric pH responsive cargo release from PDA and PEG coated mesoporous silica nanoparticles: a comparative study in Drosophila melanogaster

Physiological stimulus-specific cargo release from nanoparticle carriers is a holy grail of drug delivery research. While the majority of such work is carried out in vitro with cell lines, widespread use of common mammalian model systems – mice and rats – is difficult due to the associated cost and regulatory restrictions. Here we use the inexpensive, easily reared, excellent genetic model system Drosophila melanogaster to test pH responsive cargo release from widely used mesoporous silica nanoparticles (MSNs) coated with pH sensitive polydopamine (PDA) and polyethylene glycol (PEG) polymers. We synthesized 650 ± 75 nm diameter PDA or PEG coated mesoporous silica nanoparticles loaded with a fluorescent dye and fed to individual adult flies. Subsequently, the passage of the particles were monitored through the fly gut. As in mammals, the fly intestine has multiple pH specific zones that are easily accessible for imaging and also genetic, biochemical or physiological manipulations. We observed that both the species of MSNs ruptured around the acidic (pH < 4.0) middle midgut of the flies. PEG coated particles showed sharper specificity of release in the acidic middle midgut of flies than the PDA coated ones and had less tendency to clump together. Our results clearly show that the Drosophila gut can be used as a model to test pH responsive biocompatible materials in vivo. Our work paves the way for greater use of Drosophila as an in vivo complete systemic model in drug delivery and smart materials research. It also suggests that such specific delivery of chemical/biological cargo can be exploited to study basic biology of the gut cells and their communication with other organs.

Targeted delivery in Drosophila middle mid-gut at pH < 4.0.

Do We have a Satisfactory Cell Viability Assay? Review of the Currently Commercially-Available Assays

Cell-based assays are an important part of the drug discovery process and clinical research. One of the main hurdles is to design sufficiently robust assays with adequate signal to noise parameters while maintaining the inherent physiology of the cells and not interfering with the pharmacology of target being investigated. A plethora of assays that assess cell viability (or cell heath in general) are commercially available and can be classified under different categories according to their concepts and principle of reactions. The assays are valuable tools, however, suffer from a large number of limitations. Some of these limitations can be procedural or operational, but others can be critical as those related to a poor concept or the lack of proof of concept of an assay, e.g. those relying on differential permeability of dyes in-and-out of viable versus compromised cell membranes. While the assays can differentiate between dead and live cells, most, if not all, of them can just assess the relative performance of cells rather than providing a clear distinction between healthy and dying cells. The possible impact of relatively high molecular weight dyes, used in most of the assay, on cell viability has not been addressed. More innovative assays are needed, and until better alternatives are developed, setup of current cell-based studies and data interpretation should be made with the limitations in mind. Negative and positive control should be considered whenever feasible. Also, researchers should use more than one orthogonal method for better assessment of cell health.

Personalized Drug Efficacy Monitoring Chip

Cancer drug resistance mechanisms such as tumor heterogeneity and adaptable feedback loops are prevalent issues facing cancer therapy development. Drug resistance can be unique to a cancer type and, most importantly, to each individual cancer patient. Consequently, testing different dosages and therapeutics directly on each individual patient sample (i.e., tumor and cancer cells) has compelling advantages compared to large scale in vitro drug testing and is a step toward personalized drug selection and effective treatment development. Recently, microfluidic-based chemo-sensitivity assays on patient biopsies have been proposed. Despite their novelty, these platforms usually rely on optical labels, optical equipment, or complex microfabricated channel geometries and structures. In this work, we proposed a novel lab on a chip platform capable of real-time and continuous screening of drug efficacy on (cancer) cell subpopulations without the need of labels or bulky readout optical equipment. In this platform, several label-free and rapid techniques have been implemented for the precise capturing of cells of interest in parallel with the real-time measurement and characterization of the effectiveness of candidate therapeutic agents. To demonstrate the utility of the platform, the effect of an apoptotic inducer, topoisomerase I inhibitor, 7-ethyl-10-hydrocamptothecin (SN38) on human colorectal carcinoma cancer cells (HCT 116) was used as a study model. Additionally, electrical results were optically verified to examine the continuous measurements of the biological mechanisms, specifically, apoptosis and necrosis, during therapeutic agent characterizations. The proposed device is a versatile platform which can also be easily redesigned for the automated and arrayed analysis of cell-drug interaction down to the single cell level. Our platform is another step toward enabling the personalized screening of drug efficacy on individual patients' samples that potentially leads to a better understanding of drug resistance and the optimization of patients' treatments.

Divide and conquer: A perspective on biochips for single-cell and rare-molecule analysis by next-generation sequencing

Recent advances in biochip technologies that connect next-generation sequencing (NGS) to real-world problems have facilitated breakthroughs in science and medicine. Because biochip technologies are themselves used in sequencing technologies, the main strengths of biochips lie in their scalability and throughput. Through the advantages of biochips, NGS has facilitated groundbreaking scientific discoveries and technical breakthroughs in medicine. However, all current NGS platforms require nucleic acids to be prepared in a certain range of concentrations, making it difficult to analyze biological systems of interest. In particular, many of the most interesting questions in biology and medicine, including single-cell and rare-molecule analysis, require strategic preparation of biological samples in order to be answered. Answering these questions is important because each cell is different and exists in a complex biological system. Therefore, biochip platforms for single-cell or rare-molecule analyses by NGS, which allow convenient preparation of nucleic acids from biological systems, have been developed. Utilizing the advantages of miniaturizing reaction volumes of biological samples, biochip technologies have been applied to diverse fields, from single-cell analysis to liquid biopsy. From this perspective, here, we first review current state-of-the-art biochip technologies, divided into two broad categories: microfluidic- and micromanipulation-based methods. Then, we provide insights into how future biochip systems will aid some of the most important biological and medical applications that require NGS. Based on current and future biochip technologies, we envision that NGS will come ever closer to solving more real-world scientific and medical problems.

Recent Advances in Droplet-based Microfluidic Technologies for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology

Recently, droplet-based microfluidic systems have been widely used in various biochemical and molecular biological assays. Since this platform technique allows manipulation of large amounts of data and also provides absolute accuracy in comparison to conventional bioanalytical approaches, over the last decade a range of basic biochemical and molecular biological operations have been transferred to drop-based microfluidic formats. In this review, we introduce recent advances and examples of droplet-based microfluidic techniques that have been applied in biochemistry and molecular biology research including genomics, proteomics and cellomics. Their advantages and weaknesses in various applications are also comprehensively discussed here. The purpose of this review is to provide a new point of view and current status in droplet-based microfluidics to biochemists and molecular biologists. We hope that this review will accelerate communications between researchers who are working in droplet-based microfluidics, biochemistry and molecular biology.

Microdroplets-on-chip: A review

Single-cell analysis serves as an important approach to study cell functions and interactions. Catering to the demand of Big Data Era, fast reactions for single cells and paralleled high-throughput analysis have become an urgent need. Microdroplet in microfluidics has advantages of modularity and integrity, as well as high throughput and sensitivity, which present great potential in the field of single-cell analysis. This review is carried out on three aspects to introduce microdroplet chips for single-cell analysis: droplet formation, droplet detection and practical functions. Structures of droplet formation are categorized into three types, including T-shaped channel, flow-involved channel and three-dimensional micro-vortice. The detection methods, including fluorescence, Raman spectroscopy, mass spectroscopy and electrochemical detection, are summarized from applications. Both pros and cons for existing techniques are reviewed and discussed. The functions of microdroplets-on-chip cover cell culture, nucleic acid test and cell identification. For each field, principles/mechanisms and/or schematic images are laconically introduced. Microdroplet in microfluidics has become a major research direction in single-cell analysis. With updated methods of droplet formation such as inertial ordering and micro-vortice, microdroplets-based biochips will expect high throughput detection and high-accuracy trace detection for clinical diagnosis in the near future.

An Integrated Microfluidics Approach for Personalized Cancer Drug Sensitivity and Resistance Assay

Cancer is the second leading cause of death globally. Matching proper treatment and dosage is crucial for a positive outcome. Any given drug may affect patients with similar tumors differently. Personalized medicine aims to address this issue. Unfortunately, most cancer samples cannot be expanded in culture, limiting conventional cell-based testing. Herein, presented is a microfluidic device that combines a drug microarray with cell microscopy. The device can perform 512 experiments to test chemosensitivity and resistance to a drug array. MCF7 and 293T cells are cultured inside the device and their chemosensitivity and resistance to docetaxel, applied at various concentrations, are determined. Cell mortality is determined as a function of drug concentration and exposure time. It is found that both cell types form cluster morphology within the device, not evident in conventional tissue culture under similar conditions. Cells inside the clusters are less sensitive to drugs than dispersed cells. These findings support a heterogenous response of cancer cells to drugs. Then demonstrated is the principle of drug microarrays by testing cell response to four different drugs at four different concentrations. This approach may enable the personalization of treatment to the particular tumor and patient and may eventually improve final patient outcome.

High-throughput, label-free, single-cell photoacoustic microscopy of intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity

Intratumoral heterogeneity, which is manifested in almost all of the hallmarks of cancer, including the significantly altered metabolic profiles of cancer cells, represents a challenge to effective cancer therapy. High-throughput measurements of the metabolism of individual cancer cells would allow direct visualization and quantification of intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity, yet the throughputs of current measurement techniques are limited to about 120 cells per hour. Here, we show that single-cell photoacoustic microscopy can reach throughputs of approximately 12,000 cells per hour by trapping single cells with blood in an oxygen-diffusion-limited high-density microwell array and by using photoacoustic imaging to measure the haemoglobin oxygen change (that is, the oxygen consumption rate) in the microwells. We demonstrate the capability of this label-free technique by performing high-throughput single-cell oxygen-consumption-rate measurements of cultured cells and by imaging intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity in specimens from patients with breast cancer. High-throughput single-cell photoacoustic microscopy of oxygen consumption rates should enable the faster characterization of intratumoral metabolic heterogeneity.

A Microfabricated Sandwiching Assay for Nanoliter and High-Throughput Biomarker Screening

Cells secrete substances that are essential to the understanding of numerous immunological phenomena and are extensively used in clinical diagnoses. Countless techniques for screening of biomarker secretion in living cells have generated valuable information on cell function and physiology, but low volume and real-time analysis is a bottleneck for a range of approaches. Here, a simple, highly sensitive assay using a high-throughput micropillar and microwell array chip (MIMIC) platform is presented for monitoring of biomarkers secreted by cancer cells. The sensing element is a micropillar array that uses the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) mechanism to detect captured biomolecules. When integrated with a microwell array where few cells are localized, interleukin 8 (IL-8) secretion can be monitored with nanoliter volume using multiple micropillar arrays. The trend of cell secretions measured using MIMICs matches the results from conventional ELISA well while it requires orders of magnitude less cells and volumes. Moreover, the proposed MIMIC is examined to be used as a drug screening platform by delivering drugs using micropillar arrays in combination with a microfluidic system and then detecting biomolecules from cells as exposed to drugs.

On-chip anticancer drug screening - Recent progress in microfluidic platforms to address challenges in chemotherapy

There is an increasing need for advanced and inexpensive preclinical models to accelerate the development of anticancer drugs. While costly animal models fail to predict human clinical outcomes, in vitro models such as microfluidic chips ('tumor-on-chip') are showing tremendous promise at predicting and providing meaningful preclinical drug screening outcomes. Research on 'tumor-on-chips' has grown enormously worldwide and is being widely accepted by pharmaceutical companies as a drug development tool. In light of this shift in philosophy, it is important to review the recent literature on microfluidic devices to determine how rapidly the technology has progressed as a promising model for drug screening and aiding cancer therapy. We review the past five years of successful developments and capabilities in microdevice technology (cancer models) for use in anticancer drug screening. Microfluidic devices that are being designed to address current challenges in chemotherapy, such as drug resistance, combinatorial drug therapy, personalized medicine, and cancer metastasis are also reviewed in detail. We provide a perspective on how personalized 'tumor-on-chip', as well as high-throughput microfluidic platforms based on patient-specific tumor cells, can potentially replace the more expensive and 'non-human' animal models in preclinical anticancer drug development.

One-Step Generation of a Drug-Releasing Hydrogel Microarray-On-A-Chip for Large-Scale Sequential Drug Combination Screening

Large-scale screening of sequential drug combinations, wherein the dynamic rewiring of intracellular pathways leads to promising therapeutic effects and improvements in quality of life, is essential for personalized medicine to ensure realistic cost and time requirements and less sample consumption. However, the large-scale screening requires expensive and complicated liquid handling systems for automation and therefore lowers the accessibility to clinicians or biologists, limiting the full potential of sequential drug combinations in clinical applications and academic investigations. Here, a miniaturized platform for high-throughput combinatorial drug screening that is "pipetting-free" and scalable for the screening of sequential drug combinations is presented. The platform uses parallel and bottom-up formation of a heterogeneous drug-releasing hydrogel microarray by self-assembly of drug-laden hydrogel microparticles. This approach eliminates the need for liquid handling systems and time-consuming operation in high-throughput large-scale screening. In addition, the serial replacement of the drug-releasing microarray-on-a-chip facilitates different drug exchange in each and every microwell in a simple and highly parallel manner, supporting scalable implementation of multistep combinatorial screening. The proposed strategy can be applied to various forms of combinatorial drug screening with limited amounts of samples and resources, which will broaden the use of the large-scale screening for precision medicine.

A scalable filtration method for high throughput screening based on cell deformability

Cell deformability is a label-free biomarker of cell state in physiological and disease contexts ranging from stem cell differentiation to cancer progression. Harnessing deformability as a phenotype for screening applications requires a method that can simultaneously measure the deformability of hundreds of cell samples and can interface with existing high throughput facilities. Here we present a scalable cell filtration device, which relies on the pressure-driven deformation of cells through a series of pillars that are separated by micron-scale gaps on the timescale of seconds: less deformable cells occlude the gaps more readily than more deformable cells, resulting in decreased filtrate volume which is measured using a plate reader. The key innovation in this method is that we design customized arrays of individual filtration devices in a standard 96-well format using soft lithography, which enables multiwell input samples and filtrate outputs to be processed with higher throughput using automated pipette arrays and plate readers. To validate high throughput filtration to detect changes in cell deformability, we show the differential filtration of human ovarian cancer cells that have acquired cisplatin-resistance, which is corroborated with cell stiffness measurements using quantitative deformability cytometry. We also demonstrate differences in the filtration of human cancer cell lines, including ovarian cancer cells that overexpress transcription factors (Snail, Slug), which are implicated in epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition; breast cancer cells (malignant versus benign); and prostate cancer cells (highly versus weekly metastatic). We additionally show how the filtration of ovarian cancer cells is affected by treatment with drugs known to perturb the cytoskeleton and the nucleus. Our results across multiple cancer cell types with both genetic and pharmacologic manipulations demonstrate the potential of this scalable filtration device to screen cells based on their deformability.

Multi-Omics Profiling of the Tumor Microenvironment: Paving the Way to Precision Immuno-Oncology

The tumor microenvironment (TME) is a multifaceted ecosystem characterized by profound cellular heterogeneity, dynamicity, and complex intercellular cross-talk. The striking responses obtained with immune checkpoint blockers, i.e., antibodies targeting immune-cell regulators to boost antitumor immunity, have demonstrated the enormous potential of anticancer treatments that target TME components other than tumor cells. However, as checkpoint blockade is currently beneficial only to a limited fraction of patients, there is an urgent need to understand the mechanisms orchestrating the immune response in the TME to guide the rational design of more effective anticancer therapies. In this Mini Review, we give an overview of the methodologies that allow studying the heterogeneity of the TME from multi-omics data generated from bulk samples, single cells, or images of tumor-tissue slides. These include approaches for the characterization of the different cell phenotypes and for the reconstruction of their spatial organization and inter-cellular cross-talk. We discuss how this broader vision of the cellular heterogeneity and plasticity of tumors, which is emerging thanks to these methodologies, offers the opportunity to rationally design precision immuno-oncology treatments. These developments are fundamental to overcome the current limitations of targeted agents and checkpoint blockers and to bring long-term clinical benefits to a larger fraction of cancer patients.