Hydrogel microfluidic co-culture device for photothermal therapy and cancer migration.

We developed the photo-crosslinkable hydrogel microfluidic co-culture device to study photothermal therapy and cancer cell migration. To culture MCF7 human breast carcinoma cells and metastatic U87MG human glioblastoma in the microfluidic device, we used 10 w/v% gelatin methacrylate (GelMA) hydrogels as a semi-permeable physical barrier. We demonstrated the effect of gold nanorod on photothermal therapy of cancer cells in the microfluidic co-culture device. Interestingly, we observed that metastatic U87MG human glioblastoma largely migrated toward vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF)-treated GelMA hydrogel-embedding microchannels. The main advantage of this hydrogel microfluidic co-culture device is to simultaneously analyze the physiological migration behaviors of two cancer cells with different physiochemical motilities and study gold nanorod-mediated photothermal therapy effect. Therefore, this hydrogel microfluidic co-culture device could be a potentially powerful tool for photothermal therapy and cancer cell migration applications.