Microfluidic Cell Culture

Microfluidics allow precise control over high throughput production and manipulation of droplets in microchannels. Droplet based microfluidics have been used to create self contained small volumes of reagents, and encapsulate materials, such as living cells. Cell biologists regularly grow aggregated cell masses, such as embryoid bodies (EBs) and organoids. These aggregates grow in a suspension of growth media, rather than a 2-dimensional layer attached to a cell culture plate. This methods have become critical to modern biomedical research, but many high throughput growth solutions rely on bulk growth, which decreases quality control to some degree.

The goal of this project was to design a microfluidic cell culture ‘lab-on-a-chip’ which would be capable of encapsulating cells in droplets, merging these with new droplet volumes, and splitting these volumes. The system was designed and the encapsulation and droplet formation was fabricated and characterized.