Device developed for tuning oxygen tension levels surrounding cancer cells

Cancer cells become more active under low oxygen tension, or hypoxia, allowing them to proliferate and migrate. Controlling oxygen tension can help with cancer treatment but is difficult to do using conventional approaches. Building off their previously published device, Koens et al. developed a dual-layer microfluidic device for controlling oxygen tension in biological systems.

When cancer cells metastasize, they migrate toward blood vessels or lymph vessels by sensing an oxygen gradient. “The faster migration speed enables the cells to reach far locations in a shorter time,” said author Kenichi Funamoto. “Therefore, understanding cancer cell migration under different oxygen tensions would provide some strategy to treat cancer cells.”

The device features two gas channels, which are placed on a separate layer to promote gas exchange. By supplying various gas mixtures into the channels, the oxygen conditions can be changed, generating an oxygen gradient. This method uniformly controls oxygen tension down to 0.3% within 15 minutes, an improvement from the old model.

The authors tested their device on a study of breast cancer cell migration and its response to changes in oxygen levels. They found with increasing levels of hypoxia, the breast cancer cells proliferate more quickly, though they require several hours to respond to changes in their surrounding oxygen levels. However, the exact causes of cell migration are inconclusive and may be due to nutrient gradients that occur with changes in the oxygen environment.

The group plans to further investigate cancer cell behaviors under various oxygen tension distributions and better understand the migration mechanism. “Since the developed device can control oxygen tension around the cells precisely and quickly, it can be applied for research of various hypoxia-related diseases,” Funamoto said.

Source: “Microfluidic platform for three-dimensional cell culture under spatiotemporal heterogeneity of oxygen tension,” by Rei Koens, Yugo Tabata, Jean C. Serrano, Satoshi Aratake, Daisuke Yoshino, Roger D. Kamm, and Kenichi Funamoto, APL Bioengineering (2020). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5127069 .