Abstract

Microdissected Tissue Processing Using Open-Space and Closed Microfluidics – From First Principles Design to Drug Testing

Thomas Gervais, Professor of Engineering Physics and Biomedical Engineering, Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal

The inability to adequately predict the response of a given patient to therapeutic agents is a major, longstanding challenge in clinical oncology. In the past decade, there has been a major push to develop ex vivo platforms to directly probe the response of a patient’s tumor to a panel of drug candidates in order to optimize drug prescription and treatment response. Due to their small sizes, versatility and precise control of the culture microenvironment, microfluidics systems have emerged as a promising approach to develop such platforms. Yet, several challenges must be solved to ensure on-chip tumor viability, simplicity of use, throughput, and to deliver quality readouts for clinical decision making. In this talk, we will discuss the concept of micro-dissected tissue (MDT) as an emerging on-chip ex vivo model that is both simple to use, and compatible with current gold standard histopathology readouts. We will introduce two platforms, drawing upon classical and open-space microfluidics, for processing them and a general method to bridge the gap between MDT processing and gold-standard histopathology. Our results set the base for a complete micro-histological platform compatible with most solid tumour cancers, that provides the equivalent of tissue microarrays to assay individual response to drugs.