Towards an Endpoint Cell Motility Assay by a Microfluidic Platform

In vitro cell motility assays are frequently used in the study of cell migration in response to anti-cancer drug treatment. Microfluidic systems represent a unique tool for the in vitro analysis of cell motility. However, they usually rely on using time-lapse microscopy to record the spatial temporal locations of the individual cells being tested. This has created a bottleneck for microfluidic systems to perform high-throughput experiments due to requirement of a costly time-lapse microscopy system. Here, we describe the development of a portable microfluidic device for endpoint analysis of cell motility. The reported device incorporates a cell alignment feature to position the seeded cells on the same initial location, so that the cells' motilities can be analyzed based on their locations at the end of the experiment after the cells have migrated. We show that the device was able to assess cancer cell motility after treatment with a migration inhibitory drug Indole-3-carbinol on MDA-MB-231 breast cancer cells, demonstrating the applicability of our device in screening anti-cancer drug compounds on cancer cells.