Principles, Techniques, and Applications of Tissue Microfluidics

Abstract

The principle of tissue microfluidics and its resultant techniques has been applied to cell analysis. Building microfluidics to suit a particular tissue sample would allow the rapid, reliable, inexpensive, highly parallelized, selective extraction of chosen regions of tissue for purposes of further biochemical analysis. Furthermore, the applicability of the techniques ranges beyond the described pathology application. For example, they would also allow the posing and successful answering of new sets of questions in many areas of fundamental research. The proposed integration of microfluidic techniques and tissue slice samples is called "tissue microfluidics" because it molds the microfluidic architectures in accordance with each particular structure of each specific tissue sample. Thus, microfluidics can be built around the tissues, following the tissue structure, or alternatively, the microfluidics can be adapted to the specific geometry of particular tissues. By contrast, the traditional approach is that microfluidic devices are structured in accordance with engineering considerations, while the biological components in applied devices are forced to comply with these engineering presets.