Wound-on-a-chip: High-throughput 3D wound healing assay with a novel SU-8 mesh chip

The dynamic process of cells is the basis of many biological problems in living organisms and has been a major research subject over several decades. In this paper, we present a novel SU-8 mesh chip (SMC) with thousands of chamber arrays for high-throughput 3D wound healing assay, which could directly and efficiently evaluate 3D cell growth process and cellular drug responses in vitro. Four kinds of adherent cells (HeLa, HepG2, HUVEC, NIH-3T3) were successfully seeded into the SMC to form three-dimensional hollow cell aggregates models with precisely pre-defined sizes and shapes, followed by monitored their spontaneous growth process in real time. Compared with traditional 2D wound healing assay, this 3D model provided more complex cellular processes and some tissue-specific properties, which conferred a high degree of clinical and biological relevance to in vitro models. NIH-3T3 and HUVEC cell aggregates in this chip that termed as "wound on a chip" model had been developed and further investigated the drug response in these 3D wound healing processes by applying different concentrations of candidate drugs.