Growing evidence has verified that some cancers are organized into a hierarchy of subpopulations of tumorigenic cancer stem cells, which drive tumor growth and disease progression as a consequence of genetic change and environment differences. However, conventional co-culturing method cannot mimic the microenvironment inside the tumor, and the cell-cell communication could not be monitored in real-time and accurately quantified. We have developed a microfluidic-based co-culturing system (Fig. 1a) which enabled the display of the spatial and temporal dynamics of the cell-cell communications, and the quantitative measurement of the parameters such as migration distance and areas, which are difficult to measure with standard techniques. Lung cancer stem cells and lung cancer cells were co-cultured in the microfluidic device and cell migratory behavior were analyzed at the single cell level. By regulating the number of cells which was controlled by the dimensions of the co-culturing unit, cancer stem cells displayed enhanced migratory ability towards small amount of cancer cells. In contrast, cancer cells actively migrated towards cancer stem cells at the early stage of interaction but stopped in close proximity after culturing for 66 h (Fig. 1b). The cancer stem cells also exhibited rapid proliferation capability when cultured with the cancer cells conditioned medium with anti-cancer drug treatment. The reconstruction of tumor microenvironment in the microfluidic chip could be further exploited to understand the biological processes and cell interactions of the cancer stems cells with cancer cells in the tumor, which would be important for the development of novel and personalized therapeutic strategies against cancers.

Quantitative study of cancer cell migrations in a microfluidic-based co-culturing system

247th National Meeting (2014)

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