Technological advances in microfluidic electroporation for biomedical applications

Intracellular delivery is a fundamental enabling technology in biomedicine, allowing exogenous nucleic acids, proteins, drugs and nanomaterials to access intracellular targets and regulate cellular functions. This capability supports disease mechanism studies, cell engineering, therapeutic development and diagnostic analysis. However, conventional bulk electroporation is limited by high voltages, non-uniform electric fields, Joule heating, electrochemical by-products and reduced cell viability. Microfluidic electroporation integrates microscale cell handling with spatially confined electric fields, enabling low-voltage, controllable and high-throughput membrane permeabilization. This review critically examines recent advances in microfluidic electroporation within a structure-field-cell framework, highlighting how microchannel engineering, micro/nanoelectrode design, multiphysics-assisted strategies and real-time evaluation methods contribute to biomedical applications. Many representative platforms have achieved delivery or transfection efficiencies above 70%, with optimized systems approaching 90-99%, while maintaining cell viabilities generally above 85-95%, depending on cell type, cargo, pulse parameters and device configuration. These advances support applications in immune-cell engineering, non-viral gene therapy, drug screening, intracellular sampling and cell inactivation. Unlike previous reviews, this work emphasizes the trade-offs among delivery efficiency, cell viability, throughput, device complexity and clinical scalability, and discusses future directions toward integrated, automated and closed-loop platforms for precision medicine.