Microfluidic Assessment of Drug Effects on Physical Properties of Androgen Sensitive and Non-Sensitive Prostate Cancer Cells

Abstract

The identification and treatment of androgen-independent prostate cancer are both challenging and significant. In this work, high-throughput deformability cytometry was employed to assess the effects of two anti-cancer drugs, docetaxel and enzalutamide, on androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cells (LNCaP) and androgen-independent prostate cancer cells (PC-3), respectively. The quantified results show that PC-3 and LNCaP present not only different intrinsic physical properties but also different physical responses to the same anti-cancer drug. PC-3 cells possess greater stiffness and a smaller size than LNCaP cells. As the docetaxel concentration increases, PC-3 cells present an increase in stiffness and size, but LNCaP cells only present an increase in stiffness. As the enzalutamide concentration increases, PC-3 cells present no physical changes but LNCaP cells present changes in both cell size and deformation. These results demonstrated that cellular physical properties quantified by the deformability cytometry are effective indicators for identifying the androgen-independent prostate cancer cells from androgen-sensitive prostate cancer cells and evaluating drug effects on these two types of prostate cancer.

High-throughput adjustable deformability cytometry utilizing elasto-inertial focusing and virtual fluidic channel

“…The throughputs of our deformability cytometry system are approximately several times higher than those of previous works. 25,36…”

“…The fluid viscosity for forming a stable virtual fluidic channel has been explored in a previous study. 37 We directly used the empirical value from the previous work.…”

Concepts, electrode configuration, characterization, and data analytics of electric and electrochemical microfluidic platforms: a review

“…7 Because of the diverse nature of cell populations, single cell analysis has been extensively used to reveal cell-to-cell variation and heterogeneity of drug response in evaluations of the efficacy of a drug treatment or a therapy. 8 For example, the analysis of single cells provides the profile of genetic, epigenetic, proteomic, and lineage information of individual cells. To obtain cellular bioelectrical properties, impedance measurement platforms which analyze cells inside an electric field created by a frequency-dependent voltage are essential.…”

Pancreatic Ductal Adenocarcinoma Cortical Mechanics and Clinical Implications

“…It is the dynamic ability of being able to deform and simultaneously resist deformation that allows tumor cells to undergo the metastatic cascade. Therefore, a method to prevent metastasis for solid tumors would be to stiffen and decrease the cell shape change ability (8,13,(23)(24)(25)(26)(27).…”