A directly stackable microsystem onto the cultured cells for cytotoxicity tests

Today’s pharmaceutical industry is facing several challenges resulting from a vastly increasing number of samples through a high-throughput screening. In addition, the increased demand for cytotoxicity tests have caused bottlenecks, which in turn is causing serious problems. Here we present a novel approach to performing the cytotoxicity test. This new method uses a directly stackable microsystem on the cultured cells. It also enables us to perform cytotoxicity tests with more reliability by providing exactly the same cell-culture environment for all experiments. The new approach consists of two fascinating modules: First, a serial dilution module can linearly dilute one drug solution into several diluted ones in a serial manner, and equally distribute them into independent microchambers. Secondly, a microcompartment module can firmly attach itself onto any cultured cells and divide the directly-covered cell surface into multiple well-type microchambers instantaneously. This microsystem has a strong feasible advantage. It hardly needs to modify the established cell culture protocols, and at the same time it can eliminate some repetitive and laborious processes. A quick flexible integrated microsystem would reduce many redundant efforts during on-chip cytotoxicity tests. H. Bang and W. G. Lee equally contributed to this work.