Supervisor Of The Microfluidics Core Facility
CurrentMicrofluidic devices (also known as lab-on-a-chip devices) provide excellent spatiotemporal control over a biological sample and its microenvironment, while preserving the tissue’s viability and architecture under the appropriate culture conditions. In oncology, the lab-on-a-chip approach can be used to observe the effects of chemotherapy and radiation on solid cancer samples and biopsies.We designed various polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) microfluidic devices allowing the culture of 3D biological samples such as microdissected tissues (MDTs, see below), organoids and spheroids. In these microfluidic devices, we can expose our 3D samples to various treatment or culture conditions. Each trapping device can accommodate and cultivate 25 to 70 MDTs distributed in 4 to 7 channels or 240 spheroids. In addition, we can design new microfluidic devices according to your needs.We also developed a new ex vivo 3D culture model, called microdissected tissues (MDTs), which are spheres of 300-400 µm in diameter. These MDTs, generated from a primary tumor sample (human or from a mouse xenograft) or from a biopsy, can be grown in a static microfluidic model (without perfusion), with viability rates of over 75% after 8 days, without suffering from hypoxia. The response of the various 3D cell models can be monitored through the analysis of the culture supernatant (approximately 70 µl), by flow cytometry or by standard histopathological techniques. We have also adapted the paraffin embedding techniques from the pathology department to generate microdissected tissue microarrays (MDTMA) to allow the molecular analysis of MDTs by immunohistochemistry or immunofluorescence techniques.
