Cell Lab-on-a-chip Research Obtained an Exciting Progress

The National Engineering Research Center for Beijing Biochip Technology (NERCBBT) (CapitalBio Corporation), Beijing announced that Professor Jing Cheng and his research team at Tsinghua University and the NERCBBT created a lab-on-a-chip style cell monitoring device which can mimic wounding processes and wound recovery processes.  The device creates artificial wounds and then continuously monitors the migration of surrounding cells as they move to heal the wound. This exciting research has been published as the cover story in the June issue of Lab on a Chip, the top scientific journal for global biochip research.

Cell migration is crucial in many normal cell physiological and pathological processes, including embryonic development, immune responses and cancer metastasis. The title of this paper is "An automatic and quantitative on-chip cell migration assay using self-assembled monolayers combined with real-time cellular impedance sensing". The article describes a novel on-chip cell migration detection method, which combines the chemical modification of the surface of gold electrodes by self-assembled monolayers (SAMs) with real-time cellular impedance sensing. The SAMs are used to inhibit cell adherence onto the sensing electrodes, forming an area devoid of cells which in effect mimic minute wounds in a monolayer of growing cells. Application of a small DC electrical signal desorbs the SAMs from the electrodes without damaging the surrounding cells. The removal of the SAMs then allows the cells to migrate onto the electrodes and the cell migration process can then be monitored in real-time by impedance sensing.

The traditional method for cell migration detection such as wound healing assay usually involves the physical scraping of a cell monolayer to create a "wound", followed by an optical observation of cell movement back into the wound area. These manual methods however tend to have low repeatability and high variation. The new method developed by Professor Jing Cheng´s team avoids these problems. Cell impedance measurements can also be monitored automatically –eliminating tedious microscopic examination of the wound area, and they are also quantitative, providing numerical measurements of the degree of impedance of the sensing electrodes. Many identical cell culture compartments and electrodes can also be manufactured using the precision microfabrication, making a high-throughput assay device. These features also make it easy to scale up the measurements to many electrodes and the uniform microfabrication of the sensing electrodes make the measurements high repeatable.

The new method is welcomed by scientists who focus on bioscience research. The RSC (Royal Society of Chemistry) introduced the cover story in a comment entitled "Holey approach to wound healing research" in its website.  The comment noted that this method could be used for high-throughput anti-migratory drug screening and drug discovery. 
(http://www.rsc.org/Publishing/Journals/cb/Volume/2008/7/holey_approach_to_wound_healing_research.asp)

SOURCE FROM CapitalBio COOPERATION