Microfluidics for studying metastatic patterns of lung cancer

Abstract

The incidence of lung cancer continues to rise worldwide. Because the aggressive metastasis of lung cancer cells is the major drawback of successful therapies, the crucial challenge of modern nanomedicine is to develop diagnostic tools to map the molecular mechanisms of metastasis in lung cancer patients. In recent years, microfluidic platforms have been given much attention as tools for novel point-of-care diagnostic, an important aspect being the reconstruction of the body organs and tissues mimicking the in vivo conditions in one simple microdevice. Herein, we present the first comprehensive overview of the microfluidic systems used as innovative tools in the studies of lung cancer metastasis including single cancer cell analysis, endothelial transmigration, distant niches migration and finally neoangiogenesis. The application of the microfluidic systems to study the intercellular crosstalk between lung cancer cells and surrounding tumor microenvironment and the connection with multiple molecular signals coming from the external cellular matrix are discussed. We also focus on recent breakthrough technologies regarding lab-on-chip devices that serve as tools for detecting circulating lung cancer cells. The superiority of microfluidic systems over traditional in vitro cell-based assays with regard to modern nanosafety studies and new cancer drug design and discovery is also addressed. Finally, the current progress and future challenges regarding printable and paper-based microfluidic devices for personalized nanomedicine are summarized. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12951-019-0492-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Cell Culture Based in vitro Test Systems for Anticancer Drug Screening

“…Microfluidic systems are prospective models for reconstructing the migration, microenvironment, and microcirculation of cells in tumor tissue. Microfluidic systems are small devices that can reproduce a specific fluid flow, constant temperature, fresh medium, flow pressure and chemical gradients characteristic of in vivo systems (Ruzycka et al, 2019; Figure 1D).…”

Understanding and Modeling Metastasis Biology to Improve Therapeutic Strategies for Combating Osteosarcoma Progression

“…When combined with 3D cell culture systems such as spheroids, microfluidic platforms can recapitulate diverse complex processes representing different stages of the cancer progression including tumor-vascular interface responses, diffusional effects of biomolecules on cell populations, and pathologic cancer processes including invasion, angiogenesis, and metastasis (165)(166)(167)(168)(169)(170). Recently, specific metastasis-on-achip platforms have been fabricated allowing for real time tracking of fluorescently labeled cancer cells and their heterotypic interactions with both ECM and normal resident cells along the full continuum of the metastatic cascade (171,172). Kong and colleagues recently reported the construction and use of a microfluidic platform for studying the organotropism of cancer cell metastasis and demonstrated the correlative value of their microfluidic system with athymic nude mice models for the evaluation of small molecule inhibiting anti-metastatic strategies (173).…”

Emerging Designs of Electronic Devices in Biomedicine

“…On the other hand, there is also the need to develop the µPAD for personalized toxicity studies. Therefore, the future trends on theranostic applications of the µPAD will be developed from the bench-to-bedside and updated to produce patient-friendly analytical assays [105].…”