Fabrication of microfluidic system for the assessment of cell migration on 3D micropatterned substrates

Cell migration and proliferation are major process in wound healing, cancer metastasis and organogenesis during development. Many cells are related to recovery process of wound. Especially, fibroblasts act an important role in wound healing. Various cytokines such as platelet derived growth factor (PDGF) can induce fibroblast migration and widely studied to investigate the cell response under controlled cytokine microenvironments during wound healing. In real tissue healing process, cell microenvironments change with tissue types and anatomical characteristics of organs. With microfluidic system, we tried to mimic the natural microenvironment of wound healing, with gradient of PDGF, a fibroblast migration inducing cytokine, and patterned substrate with different orientation to PDGF gradient. Fibroblasts cultured in PDGF gradient micro fluidic chip showed cell migration under various micro environmental gradient conditions. Cells were cultured under PDGF gradient condition and different substrate pattern. Mouse fibroblast L929 cells were cultured in the microfluidic gradient. The results showed that most cells migrated along the substrate topological patterns under high concentration of PDGF. We developed long range sustaining micro fluidic channel and could analyze cell migration along the gradient of PDGF. Also, the cell migration on patterned extracellular environment shows that cells migrate along the extracellular 3D pattern rather than directly along the cytokine gradient when the pattern height is less than 1 μm. In this study, we could demonstrate that the extracellular pattern is more dominant to cell migration in combination with cytokine gradient in the wounded tissue when the environmental cues are 20 μm.