Abstract
Advances in medical research and medical equipment result in most of the diseases to be either cured or eradicated. However, cancer, the greatest threat to human-being, does not belong to them. Cancer metastasis is the most frightening part within getting cancer. Statistics from Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results show that 5-year survival rate of patients diagnosed with stage I lung cancer is more than 50%. However, 5-year survival rate of patients diagnosed with IV lung cancer is less than 5%. Relative research on cancer metastasis and tumor has been proposed in 1970s. Those reports showed that as tumor size exceeding certain dimension it will secret vascular endothelial growth factor to stimuli microvascular around itself if the tumor is lack of nutrition inside. The induced microvascular will migrate and proliferate toward the tumor body and provides nutrition to nourish it where the process is called angiogenesis which is a crucial process within cancer metastasis. Based on this, a kind of cancer therapy using angiogenic inhibitors for cancer treatment was proposed and known as targeted therapy. In recent years, targeted therapy in combination with chemotherapy has been considered to be a new dawn for cancer treatment. However, drug testing, in practice, was restricted by various reasons including the cost, the law and the ethical problems. Thankfully, these restrictions could be eliminated due to the advance in microfluidics technology which provides an excellent platform for biomedical application. In the past, most research on angiogenesis showed the direct use of one kind of known growth factor for cell chemotaxis study. In reality, there are various unknown factors being secreted during a cell cycle. Approaches used in those reports are still far from the in vivo condition. For this reason, this project is expected to build a microfluidic device which integrates the microscale fluid properties and cell mechanical properties for mimicking the cell induced angiogenesis in vitro. We expect this in vitro model could provide helpful information for clinical trial and cancer tumor study.