The first lab-on-a-chip platform for complete mammalian cell culture has been developed by scientists in Canada. This could be used to create an automated device to continually grow generations of cells for use in cell biology and tissue engineering. 

Although applications involving mammalian cells have been extremely popular in the microfluidics community, until now they could only be used for single subcultures -once cells had been seeded and grown, both the device and cells had to be discarded. Aaron Wheeler at the University of Toronto has used digital microfluidics to develop a device where cells can continuously be seeded, grown and then moved onto fresh culture sites within the same platform for analysis. 

Digital microfluidics is a technique where an array of electrodes on a surface is used to exert electromechanical forces on a droplet, such that you can drag or dance droplets around on a surface as well as dispense them from reservoirs and split or merge them to effect chemical reactions. Wheeler had the innovative idea to translate the technique for use in cell culturing. 

In Wheeler's device, traditional flasks used in conventional cell culture are replaced by regions of patterned electrodes, called adhesion pads, where cells are seeded and grown in droplets. New growth media is easily delivered to cells by adding new source droplets that simultaneously sweeps away the old media. Once grown selected cells are moved to new adhesion pads by treating with trypsin, creating generation after generation of cells. 

'Complete cell culture is a very common technique that lots of folk do but it's tedious and time consuming and requires constant vigilance and attention. We were excited by the idea of potentially developing an automated system that could run for weeks at a time without human intervention,' says Wheeler. 

Scott Martin, an expert in using microchip-based analytical devices to study biological systems at Saint Louis University, US, says 'the ability of being able to transfect cells on-demand is a significant step towards the development of devices that enable fully automated cell culture studies where cells are cultured and assayed on the same platform.' 

An important application of the technique would be for culturing precious cell types, such as stem cells, where only a very small number of cells are available says Wheeler. Initial data suggests the technique will be generally applicable to all cell types and the team are working to confirm this.  

Jennifer Newton 

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