A microfluidic Transwell to study chemotaxis

Chemotaxis is typically studied in vitro using commercially available products such as the Transwell® in which cells migrate through a porous membrane in response to one or more clearly defined chemotactic stimuli. Despite its widespread use, the Transwell assay suffers from being largely an endpoint assay, with built-in errors due to inconsistent pore size and human sampling. In this study, we report a microfluidic chemotactic chip that provides real-time monitoring, consistent paths for cell migration, and easy on-chip staining for quantifying migration. To compare its performance with that of a traditional Transwell chamber, we investigate the chemotactic response of MDA-MB-231 1833 metastatic breast cancer cells to epidermal growth factor (EGF). The results show that while both platforms were able to detect a chemotactic response, we observed a dose-dependent response of breast cancer cells towards EGF with low non-specific migration using the microfluidic platform, whereas we observed a dose-independent response of breast cancer cells towards EGF with high levels of non-specific migration using the commercially available Transwell.The microfluidic platform also allowed EGF-dependent chemotactic responses to be observed 24 h, a substantially longer window than seen with the Transwell. Thus the performance of our microfluidic platform revealed phenomena that were not detected in the Transwell under the conditions tested.