Abstract
In cancer research, angiogenesis is always an important issue. One of the well-known cancer growing procedures is metastasis which has been known as the most horrible stage of cancer. Then angiogenesis, the necessary procedure in metastasis, has been a quite important target for cancer treatment. The angiogenesis is still a mysterious process because of the various growth factor that affect the cancer in human body. Here we propose a microfluidic chip that is designed for multi-cell interaction observation. For angiogenesis research, most of them show using only one kind of growth factor to construct the in vitro model. Our proposed chip was used to demonstrate and observe the angiogenesis induced by multi-cell interaction. By the analysis of flow resistance and diffusion gradient, we can separately place the cell to the three different culture areas. The cell interaction could be observed in the designed observation zone. In our experimental results, we can properly culture HUVEC, 3T3 and A549 in the chip and observe the number of HUVEC cells growing from 64 to 129 in 3 days by using Image J for the characterization. We demonstrate a unique in vitro model for multi-cell interaction. This model is expected to mimic the angiogenesis conditions in vitro. We expect this on-chip model to provide helpful information for angiogenesis and cancer study.