A Microfluidic System for Automatic Cell Culture

This study presents a new chip capable of automating the cell culture process by using microfluidic technology. This microfluidic cell culture system comprising of microheaters, a micro temperature sensor, micropumps, microvalves, microchannels, a cell culture area and several reservoirs was fabricated by using micro-electro-mechanical-systems (MEMS) fabrication processes. Manual cell culture processes can be performed on this chip without using incubators. A typical cell culturing process for human lung cancer cells (A549) was successfully performed to demonstrate the capability of the developed microfluidic system. This automatic cell culturing system can be eventually integrated with subsequent microfluidic modules for cell purification, collection, counting and lysis to form a cell-based micro-total-analysis-system.