The need for high-throughput cell analysis/drug screening has been increased with the progress in biotechnology and combinatorial chemistry. In order to address the requirements of expensive equipments and long/tedious experimental works for highthroughput screening, a chip-based cell assay has been developed and reported in recent researches. However, in these previous devices it was relatively difficult to expand them into a two dimensional array with a large number of analysis sites. Also, the flow of cell suspension media or reagents should be maintained to be flowing into the captured cell in order to uphold the cells in each capturing site during the cell culturing and analysis. In this work, we propose a microfluidic chip with multiple micro-wells in two dimension arrays. The proposed chip provides a physical isolation in the captured cells using a PDMS membrane cover, so that a specific reagent can be introduced into each micro-well without continuously maintaining a cell suspension media flow.

The device has total 16 micro-wells in a 4x4 array.
Pictures of the fabricated device:

This picture shows the experimental results of cell capturing and drug injection into the specific target cell using the fabricated device.

This movie shows the experimental results of cell capturing and drug injection into the specific target cell using the fabricated device.

1. Kwang-Seok Yun, and Euisik Yoon, "A Micro/Nano-Fluidic Chip-Based Micro-Well Array for High-Throughput Cell Analysis and Drug Screening," Proceedings of International Conference on Miniaturized Chemical and Biochemical Analysis Systems (micro TAS'03), pp.861-864, Squaw Valley, California, USA, 5-9 October 2003.