REVIEW ARTICLE
Microfluidic Micropillar Arrays for 3D Cell Culture
Minseok S. Kim, Hyundoo Hwang, Youn-Suk Choi, Je-Kyun Park*
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2008Volume: 2
First Page: 224
Last Page: 228
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-2-224
DOI: 10.2174/1874070700802010224
Article History:
Received Date: 01/04/2008Revision Received Date: 07/07/2008
Acceptance Date: 11/07/2008
Electronic publication date: 6/8/2008
Collection year: 2008
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Cell-based assays are one of the most important steps to select huge amount of drug candidates in drug discovery. To get more credible assay results, cell culture in the form of microscale environment and three-dimension has been exploited by microfluidic hydrodynamic focusing. However, the method still needs an enhanced reliability of scaffold formation and fast cell immobilization in a microchannel. In this report, we fabricated a microfluidic micropillar arrays (MMA) platform for cell culture using a poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) replica molding process. Peptide hydrogel and Matrigel were nicely patterned along the micropillars by surface tension. In addition, a linear concentration gradient profile was presented in a stripe-shaped Matrigel matrix and the simulation result with computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver was corresponded to the experimental profile. The MMA platform was successfully applied to the hepatocellular carcinoma cell (HepG2) culture for 2 days.