Abstract

Microfluidics For Interrogating Intact Tumor Biopsies

Albert Folch, Professor of Bioengineering, University of Washington

The intricate microarchitecture of tissues – the “tissue microenvironment” – is a strong determinant of tissue function. Microfluidics offers an invaluable tool to precisely stimulate, manipulate, and analyze the tissue microenvironment in live tissues and engineer mass transport around and into small tissue volumes. Such control is critical in clinical studies, especially where tissue samples are scarce (e.g. tumor biopsies), in analytical sensors, where testing smaller amounts of analytes results in faster, more portable sensors, and in biological experiments, where accurate control of the cellular microenvironment is needed (e.g. organ-on-a-chip). Microfluidics also provides inexpensive multiplexing strategies to address the pressing need to test large quantities of drugs and reagents on a single biopsy specimen, increasing testing accuracy, relevance, and speed while reducing overall diagnostic cost. I will discuss the development of our platforms for cancer diagnostics that allow for multiplexed functional drug testing on live, intact tissues in various formats: 1) tumor slices; 2) core needle biopsies; and 3) cuboids (precision-sliced tumor fragments that retain viability and the tumor microenvironment for several days). These platforms are currently under commercial development by startup OncoFluidics.