μLSI

Microfluidic devices for high-throughput screening in microscale 3D tissue models

mlsi

People involved: Marco Rasponi, Gianfranco B. Fiore, Alberto Redaelli, Francesco Piraino

Funding source: Cariplo Foundation

Funding period: 2009 - 2011

Partners: Fondazione Gruppo Ospedaliero San Donato; IRCCS Istituto Ortopedico Galeazzi; Massachussetts Institute of Technology.

Many biological studies, drug screening methods, and cellular therapies require culture and manipulation of living cells outside of their natural environment in the body. The gap between the cellular microenvironment in vivo and in vitro, however, poses challenges for obtaining physiologically relevant responses from cells used in basic biological studies or drug screening.
Aiming at filling this gap, our objective is the development of a programmable microfluidic device with a large number of individually controlled microscale tissue culture chambers. Each chamber will be functionalized with an optical sensing polymer to monitor the dissolved oxygen concentration in real-time for a high-throughput screening.
The present project aims at further developing the current methodologies for studying three-dimensional biological tissue models. In fact it is well known how 3D tissue cultures represent significantly better models for biological studies than traditional 2D approaches. High-throughput systems in 3D tissue cultures represent an innovative and effective approach to optimize study and screening of biological parameters during cell interaction with different culture environments.
During this project an enabling platform technology will be developed which will allow to accelerate basic knowledge production in the biological, pharmaceutical and biomedical fields. Microfluidic LSI (mLSI) represents an emerging methodology with relevant applications in different scientific fields. Its recent diffusion is mainly due to the versatility and low cost of its processes, and to the ease of technological transferability and application.