Microfluidic devices for studying heterotypic cell-cell interactions and tissue specimen cultures under controlled microenvironments

• Main Authors: Zervantonakis, Ioannis K. (Contributor), Kothapalli, Chandrasekhar R. (Contributor), Chung, Seok (Author), Sudo, Ryo (Author), Kamm, Roger Dale (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Biological Engineering (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: American Institute of Physics (AIP), 2014-09-09T16:07:14Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Microfluidic devices allow for precise control of the cellular and noncellular microenvironment at physiologically relevant length- and time-scales. These devices have been shown to mimic the complex in vivo microenvironment better than conventional in vitroassays, and allow real-time monitoring of homotypic or heterotypic cellularinteractions.Microfluidic culture platforms enable new assay designs for culturing multiple different cell populations and/or tissue specimens under controlled user-defined conditions. Applications include fundamental studies of cell population behaviors, high-throughput drug screening, and tissue engineering. In this review, we summarize recent developments in this field along with studies of heterotypic cell-cell interactions and tissue specimen culture in microfluidic devices from our own laboratory.
National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant EFRI-0735997)
IR&D Project DL-H-550151
Charles Stark Draper Laboratory
Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology
National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (U.S.) (Grant EB003805)