Biology on a chip: microfabrication for studying the behavior of cultured cells

The ability to culture cells in vitro has revolutionized hypothesis testing in basic cell and molecular biology research and has become a standard methodology in drug screening and toxicology assays. However, the traditional cell culture methodology--consisting essentially of the immersion of a large population of cells in a homogeneous fluid medium--has become increasingly limiting, both from a fundamental point of view (cells in vivo are surrounded by complex spatiotemporal microenvironments) and from a practical perspective (scaling up the number of fluid handling steps and cell manipulations for high-throughput studies in vitro is prohibitively expensive). Microfabrication technologies have enabled researchers to design, with micrometer control, the biochemical composition and topology of the substrate, the medium composition, as well as the type of neighboring cells surrounding the microenvironment of the cell. In addition, microtechnology is conceptually well suited for the development of fast, low-cost in vitro systems that allow for high-throughput culturing and analysis of cells under large numbers of conditions. Here we review a variety of applications of microfabrication in cell culture studies, with an emphasis on the biology of various cell types.