A microfluidic chip of multiple channel array with various oxygen tensions for drug screening
Oxygen participates in numbers of cellular activities and behaviors in both normal and pathological tissues. In physiological microenvironment, oxygen tension is generally below 21 and varies in different species, states and regions of organs. However, present studies of cellular behavior in vitro are performed in an ambient level, which is not conformity to the reality in vivo. In this study, a microfluidic device was developed to generate controllable oxygen tensions on a multiple channel array chip for high throughput drug screening. Controlling various concentrations of chemical reagents with confined flow rate, specific oxygen tensions can be established from 1.6 to 21 where the oxygen tension of each channel can be modulated in demand. When the concentrations of pyrogallol change from 100 to 700 mg/mL with the flow rate of 5 mL/min, oxygen tensions in cell chambers range from 12.5 to 3.87 Pyrogallol with the concentration of 0 mg/mL is used as the control group to obtain 20.9 oxygen condition. The developed microfluidic chip was used to investigate the cytotoxicity of TPZ and cisplatin, and the results demonstrate different manners of two oxygen sensitive anti tumor drugs in oxygen dependent cytotoxic responses. Due to its character, the microfluidic device is believed to establish any desired and measurable oxygen tension distribution for pharmacology development, which is promising to improve efficiency and reduce tedious operation for pharmaceutical studies.