Microfluidic cell-based assays by 3D cell culture in a peptide scaffold

This paper describes a novel cell culture platform for 3D cell immobilization as well as a dose-dependant cell-based assay by forming linear concentration gradient inside a peptide scaffold of a microchannel. A sol-gel transition peptide hydrogel, Puramatrix™, was first adopted in microfluidics. As the mixture of the peptide hydrogel and human hepatocellular carcinoma cells (HepG2) was flowed and gelled in the middle of a main channel by diffusion of media, we could simply fabricate a stripe-shaped peptide scaffold. Encapsulated HepG2 were cultivated in the 3D microenvironment and applied to cytotoxicity assays using Triton X-100.