Abstract
According to the statistics of Center for Disease Control and Prevention, there are about 11% of women at 15–44 year of age in the United States encountering difficulty for pregnancy regardless of marital status. Ought to the high rate of infertility, artificial insemination becomes more important to assist on the infertility issues. IVF increases the rate of pregnancy however the success rate is only 35%. One of key points to this low successful rate was stemmed from the protection shell of oocytes retarding sperm self-inseminations. Therefore, cumulus mass and zona pellucid removal using enzyme medium (hyaluronidase and trypsin) was proposed by Yujiroh Kamiguchi [2] to assist sperms’ insemination. Although widely used, however there consists of a serious concern regarding that the oocyte must be shifted to different medium frequently and easily to get severe hurt during the shifting processes. To solve this problem, a 3D microfluidic device is designed in this study and demonstrated the utility on mice oocyte. The device can accommodate oocyte at a specific position and allow pipetting/exchanging enzyme medium/buffers into the position directly without moving oocyte. In this way, cumulus mass and zona pellucid can be detached from oocytes safely and gently at the same time before oocytes used in IVF.