Designing Compact Microfluidic Structures to study Cancer Cell Metastasis via Flow-less Spatial and Temporal Gradients*

Metastasis, the migration of cancer cells away from an original tumor to other tissues, is the primary cause of morbidity and mortality in cancer patients. This migration is controlled by complex biomechanical processes and triggered by diverse stimuli. We seek to develop a set of microfluidic tools to investigate metastasis that will allow us to analytically pinpoint triggering factors by studying changes in cell migration as prompted by as few simultaneous stimuli as possible. These devices are microfluidic structures that produce stable, controlled gradient flows across and along a microfluidic gradient chamber. They will allow us to study how extracellular chemical gradients of various compositions and/or concentrations drive ovarian carcinoma cell migration. These tools follow our previous work and use the concept of splitting and recombining flows through a series of bifurcations and trifurcations, while introducing a gradient chamber separate from the cell culture chamber. Bright field and epi-fluorescence microscopy will be used to characterize these devices.