Related Experiment Video
Updated: Jun 18, 2025
Microfluidic Co-Culture Models for Dissecting the Immune Response in in vitro Tumor Microenvironments
Published on: April 30, 2021
Quantitatively Evaluating Interactions between Patient-Derived Organoids and Autologous Immune Cells by Microfluidic
Mingyao Gao1, Wenyong Ding1, Yadong Wang2,3
1Department of Biomedical Engineering, School of Medical Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China.
Abstract:
The coculture of patient-derived tumor organoids (PDOs) and autologous immune cells has been considered as a useful ex vivo surrogate of in vivo tumor-immune environment. However, the immune interactions between PDOs and autologous immune cells, including immune-mediated killing behaviors and immune-related cytokine variations, have yet to be quantitatively evaluated. This study presents a microfluidic chip for quantifying interactions between PDOs and autologous immune cells (IOI-Chip). A baffle-well structure is designed to ensure efficient trapping, long-term coculturing, and in situ fluorescent observation of a limited amount of precious PDOS and autologous immune cells, while a microbeads-based immunofluorescence assay is designed to simultaneously quantify multiple kinds of immune-related cytokines in situ. The PDO apoptosis and 2 main immune-related cytokines, TNF-α and IFN-γ, are simultaneously quantified using samples from a lung cancer patient. This study provides, for the first time, a capability to quantify interactions between PDOs and autologous immune cells at 2 levels, the immune-mediated killing behavior, and multiple immune-related cytokines, laying the technical foundation of ex vivo assessment of patient immune response.
