A microfluidic chip enabling single cell analysis of tumor-stromal intercellular communication

In this paper, we report single cell screening platform that can be used not only to monitor the crosstalk during the co-culture of tumor and stromal cells but also to retrieve both individual donor and neighboring recipient cells for further investigation of the intercellular communication. Compared to the previous reports, the important advantage is the capability of the facile retrieval of both specific single donor cell and recipient cells after the co-culture, which enables single cell level molecular analysis to achieve in-depth understanding of the specific intercellular communication in cancer microenvironment.