A Labchip with Co-Cultured Spheroids Applied for HIPEC Cancer Drug Screening

Cancer has always been one of the health issues of concern to all walks of life. The reason why cancer is difficult to cure is that cancer cells will metastasize or spread to other parts of the body. However, the cancer cells in the abdominal cavity of patients are metastasized from colorectal cancer, rectal cancer, gastric cancer, etc. In recent years, Hyperthermic Intraperitoneal Chemotherapy (HIPEC), is an emerging therapy that has attracted attention. Based on Microelectromechanical technology, this research designs a multi-layer microfluidic chip, which has the function of the automatic combination of multiple drugs and co-culture of multicellular tumor spheroids in different cell proportions. With the heating device, the chip and drug temperature during drug perfusion was maintained at 37, 43 and 45 °C, respectively, to simulate and test the treatment process of intraperitoneal hyperthermic chemotherapy. This microfluidic system is developed with and aims to provide clinicians with screening the suitable drug combination for individual patients before surgery to approach precision medicine and customized treatment.