Ph.D. Program in Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung, Taiwan.
Lab Chip. 2019 Apr 9;19(8):1370-1377. doi: 10.1039/c9lc00036d.
Studies on cellular heterogeneity have emerged as a powerful approach for developing new strategies to treat diseases including cancer. However, it is difficult to set up an in vitro co-culture experiment to study the interaction of individual live cells. In this paper, we report a hydrodynamic shuttling chip (HSC) which can deterministically capture single cells into microfluidic chambers to set up multiple single-cell co-culture experiments in which individual live cells can be microscopically observed. Using this chip device, we demonstrated a triple single-cell culture of oral squamous cell carcinoma and lymphatic endothelial cells to observe the effect of cell-cell interaction on the cell motility. Triple, single-cell pairing efficiency by our HSC device was eightfold higher than that of the probabilistic method. Using this HSC device, we were able to perform triple-culture experiments to show the cell type-dependent motility of oral squamous cell carcinoma and lymphatic endothelial cells, which was not observed in co-culture experiments.
细胞异质性研究已成为一种治疗癌症等疾病的新策略的有力方法。然而，建立体外共培养实验来研究单个活细胞的相互作用是困难的。在本文中，我们报告了一种流体动力学穿梭芯片（HSC），可以将单个细胞确定性地捕获到微流控腔室中，以建立多个单细胞共培养实验，在这些实验中可以对单个活细胞进行显微镜观察。使用该芯片装置，我们演示了口腔鳞状细胞癌和淋巴管内皮细胞的三重单细胞培养，以观察细胞间相互作用对细胞迁移的影响。我们的 HSC 装置的三重单细胞配对效率比概率方法高八倍。使用这种 HSC 装置，我们能够进行三重培养实验，以显示口腔鳞状细胞癌和淋巴管内皮细胞的细胞类型依赖性迁移，而在共培养实验中则没有观察到这种迁移。
