The Fabrication and Application Mechanism of Microfluidic Systems for High Throughput Biomedical Screening: A Review

Abstract

Microfluidic systems have been widely explored based on microfluidic technology, and it has been widely used for biomedical screening. The key parts are the fabrication of the base scaffold, the construction of the matrix environment in the 3D system, and the application mechanism. In recent years, a variety of new materials have emerged, meanwhile, some new technologies have been developed. In this review, we highlight the properties of high throughput and the biomedical application of the microfluidic chip and focus on the recent progress of the fabrication and application mechanism. The emergence of various biocompatible materials has provided more available raw materials for microfluidic chips. The material is not confined to polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) and the extracellular microenvironment is not limited by a natural matrix. The mechanism is also developed in diverse ways, including its special physical structure and external field effects, such as dielectrophoresis, magnetophoresis, and acoustophoresis. Furthermore, the cell/organ-based microfluidic system provides a new platform for drug screening due to imitating the anatomic and physiologic properties in vivo. Although microfluidic technology is currently mostly in the laboratory stage, it has great potential for commercial applications in the future.

In vitro Models of the Small Intestine for Studying Intestinal Diseases

“…The cells and media are added in the structure to form a model. It is easy to control the culture environment in the microfluidic device because the volume of the culture is small, and the structure is accordingly designed ( Vickerman et al, 2008 ; Song et al, 2020 ). In addition, this model can be designed by the researcher using silicon material, i.e., the model has been modified for the advantages of TEER measurement and visualization ( Henry et al, 2017 ).…”

Toward improved in vitro models of human cancer

“…Conversely, most microfluidic platforms designed for high-throughput applications (e.g., single-cell analysis) rely on simplistic designs (e.g., microwells to capture single cells) unable to capture the complex structure and interactions of biological tissues and organs in BMOMs. 86 Specifically, a few high throughput platforms have been developed and even commercialized to generate spheroids or luminal structures dedicated to drug testing purposes. 87–89 These platforms present potential advantages of scale and capacity of testing multiple drug conditions and combinations, much needed for anticancer drug screening.…”

Organ-on-a-Chip systems for new drugs development

“…Although several analytical methods can be coupled to OoC (see Table 2 for some examples), these systems still show lower capacity to adapt to HTS than 2D tissues. OoC will, however, present a higher adaptability as soon as faster and more reliable analytical systems are developed for on-line analysis [4,13,62,71,75]. The integration of sensors in OoC systems provides an additional advantage over animal and human models as electrophysiological signals can be collected and analyzed on real-time [28,58].…”