Single-cell droplet microfluidics for biomedical applications

Abstract

Single-cell manipulation and analysis is critical to the study of many fundamental biological processes and uncovering cellular heterogeneity and presents the potential for extremely valuable applications in biomedical fields, including...

Droplet microfluidics for CTC-based liquid biopsy: a review

“…10 Over the past few decades, biomedical applications of droplet microfluidics have been well reviewed concerning aspects of single-cell analysis, molecule detection, and drug discovery. [11][12][13] To the best of our knowledge, despite the important role of CTCs in the cancer diagnosis, monitoring, and therapy, no specific review on droplet microfluidics for the CTC-based liquid biopsy exists. It is to be noticed that for single-cell analysis of CTCs in droplet microfluidics, the rarity of CTCs and the existence of abundant background blood cells (the number of CTCs in 1 mL blood is only 0-50, while there exits over 10 9 blood cells) are still the main obstacles.…”

Recent Advances on Cell Culture Platforms for In Vitro Drug Screening and Cell Therapies: From Conventional to Microfluidic Strategies

“…As a result, relevant review articles address the technical challenges that limit the widespread accessibility of microfluidics, [22] the understanding of molecular and cell biology that can be enhanced by precision microfluidic approaches, [23] as well as the role of microfluidics in high-throughput drug screening applications. [24] Furthermore, recent literature explores the appli-cation of microfluidic devices in anticancer and personalized cancer drug screening, [25] organoid-based disease models combined with microfluidics, [26] as well as the advances in the application of specific types of microfluidic devices in biomedicine, such as single-cell droplet microfluidics, [27] and concentration gradient microfluidics. [28] In this context, the present review represents an update to the current literature by addressing the most relevant practical considerations of the topics mentioned above while explicitly highlighting cell culture's essential role in drug screening.…”

Recent advances in microfluidics for single-cell functional proteomics

“…17 Few reviews have discussed SCP developments with respect to microfluidics-based strategies, 16,18 yet most of their focus were on either multiomics approaches (with little emphasis on MS-based SCP) 16,[19][20][21] or fundamentals of microfluidics technologies. 22,23 In this review, recent developments in microfluidics-based SCP, including their distinct features, advantages, limitations, applications, and future prospects, will be systematically discussed. We will introduce the capabilities of microfluidics and targeted analysis of singlecell proteins, and then describe in detail the state-of-the-art microfluidics methods for MS-based global SCP analysis, with particular attention on the miniaturization of sample preparation, enhanced proteome depth, and the biological information disclosed by these approaches.…”