Development of artificial cell culture platforms using microfluidics

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b2311575_ (Table of contents)

Acquiring quantitative data about cells, cell-cell interactions and cellular responses to surrounding environments are crucial for medical diagnostics, treatment and cell biology research. Nowadays, this is possible through microfluidic cell culture platforms. These devices, lab-on-a-chip (LOC), are capable of culturing cells with the feature of mimicking in vivo cellular conditions. Through the control of fluids in small volumes, LOC closely mimics the nature of cells in the tissues compared to conventional cell culturing platforms such as flasks and cell culture plates. On the other hand, existing LOC-based cell culturing platforms are highly complicated to be used in clinics or laboratories without an expert who develops these microfluidic platforms. Therefore, in this thesis we developed simple and user-friendly microfluidic cell culturing platforms and compared our obtained data with the conventional methods. We performed our research on different human cancer cell lines including liver hepatocellular carcinoma, breast adenocarcinoma, and lymphoma cell lines; both monocytes and monocyte-differentiated macrophages. We examined proliferation rate, morphological and phenotypical differences of the cells in different scales. In addition to cell culturing platform, we developed a microfluidic gradient generator to precisely titrate the concentration of chemicals and observed cellular responses to these stresses. Moreover, we quantitatively inspected the effect of different intravenous fluids on different human cancer cell lines. Finally, we have developed simple, low-cost and integrable microfluidic platforms, those can be used by untrained people, and perform cell culture experiments in a population at single-cell resolution. Our microfluidic cell culture platforms provide more quantitative and qualitative data compared to traditional batch culture assays