Micro and Bio Fluid Dynamics
Microfluidics allows precise control of fluids, molecules and particles at the nanoliter scale and facilitates simultaneous manipulation and analysis of cultured cells, starting from a single cell to larger populations and to intact tissues. Microscale engineering technologies allow great flexibility in the design of microfluidic devices, which can be tailored to the needs of individual cell types and cellular co-cultures can be implemented on the same chip. The advantages of microfluidic cell culture include the ability to more closely mimic a cell's natural microenvironment, to study low numbers of cells or single cells in high temporal and/or spatial resolution, and to reduce consumption of reagents.
Furthermore, microscale engineering technologies provide unprecedented opportunities to create cell culture microenvironments that go beyond current three-dimensional in vitro models by recapitulating the critical tissue–tissue interfaces, spatiotemporal chemical gradients, and dynamic physical microenvironments of living matter (bioMEMS). Recent advances in this field contributed to the development of ‘Organs-on-Chips’ in which living cells are cultured within microfluidic devices that have been microengineered to reconstitute tissue arrangements observed in living organs in order to study physiology in an organ-specific context and to develop specialized in vitro disease models, as alternatives to conventional cell culture models and animal testing for pharmaceutical and toxicology applications.
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