The Rapid Fabrication of Hydrogel Microfluidic Chip for Cell Capture Culture and Metabolites Detection

The microfluidic chip with well-defined structure is an important platform for cell research. The existing techniques for chip fabrication especially in cell biology and tissue engineering have many defects, for example, poor processing precision, high processing cost, as well as sophisticated manufacturing procedure. Thus, fabrication of simple and practicable microfluidic chip with highly efficient cell control ability and low-cost is turned to be the main target for bioengineering application. Poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) is a hydrophilic polymer. Substituting terminal hydroxyl groups with acrylates, forming poly(ethylene glycol) diacrylate (PEGDA), allows the polymer to be cross-linked to form a three-dimensional polymer network. Meanwhile the use of photopolymerization can realize precise and temporal control of polymerization for formation of complex shapes. Herein, we utilize PEGDA hydrogel's highly tunable characteristic, using photopolymerization method to obtain desirable micro-structure. Each chip has four of uniform micro-structures, which can carry multiple parallel experiments at the same time. We also add 2-Hydroxyethyl Methacrylate (HEMA) to the PEGDA prepolymer in order to increase the cell adhesion capacity of the microchip surface for cell culture. The experimental results showed that this method can achieve double-layer cell culture with short time treatment. Cells can be well captured and cultured in the hydrogel microfluidic chip with excellent activity. The hydrogel microfluidic chip has the potential of practicable application once large-scale preparation is accomplished.