A MICRO/NANO-FLUIDIC CHIP-BASED MICRO-WELL ARRAY FOR HIGH-THROUGHPUT CELL ANALYSIS AND DRUG SCREENING

We have developed a microfluidic chip for high-throughput cell analysis, drug screening and microbead-based assay. The proposed device can provide three consecutive functions: autonomous capture of cells into multiple micro-wells in a two dimensional array; active physical sealing of micro-wells for cell confinement; and specific chemical injection into each micro-well. Needs for high-throughput cell analysis/drug screening have been increased with the progress in biotechnology and combinatorial chemistry. In order to address the requirements of expensive equipments and long/tedious experimental works for high- throughput screening, a chip-based cell assay has been developed and reported in recent researches ( 1)(2). However, in these previous devices it was relatively difficult to expand them into a two dimensional array with a large number of analysis sites. Also, the flow of cell suspension media or reagents should be maintained to be flowing into the captured cell in order to uphold the cells in each capturing site during the cell culturing and analysis. In this work, we propose a microfluidic chip with multiple micro-wells in two dimension arrays. The proposed chip provides a physical isolation in the captured cells using a PDMS membrane cover, so that a specific reagent can be introduced into each micro-well without continuously maintaining a cell suspension media flow.