Development of a microfluidic perfusion 3D cell culture system

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

<P>Recently, 3-dimensional <I>in vitro</I> cell cultures have gained much attention in biomedical sciences because of the closer relevance between <I>in vitro</I> cell cultures and <I>in vivo</I> environments. This paper presents a microfluidic perfusion 3D cell culture system with consistent control of long-term culture conditions to mimic an <I>in vivo</I> microenvironment. It consists of two sudden expansion reservoirs to trap incoming air bubbles, gradient generators to provide a linear concentration, and microchannel mixers. Specifically, the air bubbles disturb a flow in the microfluidic channel resulting in the instability of the perfusion cell culture conditions. For long-term stable operation, the sudden expansion reservoir is designed to trap air bubbles by using buoyancy before they enter the culture system. The performance of the developed microfluidic perfusion 3D cell culture system was examined experimentally and compared with analytical results. Finally, it was applied to test the cytotoxicity of cells infected with Ewing’s sarcoma. Cell death was observed for different concentrations of H<SUB>2</SUB>O<SUB>2</SUB>. For future work, the developed microfluidic perfusion 3D cell culture system can be used to examine the behavior of cells treated with various drugs and concentrations for high-throughput drug screening.</P>