A novel 96well-formatted micro-gap plate enabling drug response profiling on primary tumour samples

Drug-based treatments are the most widely used interventions for cancer management. Personalized drug response profiling remains inherently challenging with low cell count harvested from tumour sample. We present a 96well-formatted microfluidic plate with built-in micro-gap that preserves up to 99.2% of cells during multiple assay/wash operation and only 9,000 cells needed for a single reagent test (i.e. 1,000 cells per test spot x 3 selected concentration x triplication), enabling drug screening and compatibility with conventional automated workstations. Results with MCF7 and MDA-MB-231 cell lines showed that no statistical significance was found in dose-response between the device and conventional 96-well plate control. Primary tumour samples from breast cancer patients tested in the device also showed good IC50 prediction. With drug screening of primary cancer cells must consider a wide range of scenarios, e.g. suspended/attached cell types and rare/abundant cell availability, the device enables high throughput screening even for suspended cells with low cell count since the signature microfluidic cell-trapping feature ensures cell preservation in a multiple solution exchange protocol.