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Abstract:

The circulatory system of the human body is akin to the engine oil of a race car and when healthy helps maintain physiological equilibrium termed homeostasis. This is enabled by the intricate composition of ingredients in the ‘human engine oil’ to allow the intricate balance of nutrients/waste and fighting off invading pathogens. Through the advancement of microfluidics technologies, we have developed on-chip circulatory delivery of fluids through vasculature networks that recapitulate the physiological circulation of the human body.  We engineered the formation of 3D tissues and organs to form the physiological microenvironment and subsequently pumped and perfused the tissue vascular network for on-chip microcirculation.  On the other hand, microfluidics play an important role in the recent advances of liquid biopsy, an emerging technique that analyzes biological samples such as blood for the detection of biomolecules or cells that are indicative of disease or physiological state.  Specifically, liquid biopsy has become a promising technology to isolate and target rare cells such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in body fluids thanks to many of these microfluidic cell sorting techniques.  This advent of microfluidic liquid biopsy provides a snap shot of the patient’s in vivo circulation to enable one to monitor disease state and progression for diagnosis and prognosis. A key bottleneck is to identify the critical subpopulation of cells, often at single cell resolution among billions of cells in circulation. The on-chip perfused vascularized tissue platform and liquid biopsy go hand-in-hand to correlate in vitro circulation with in vivo circulation with great promise for the development of precision medicine.  Ultimately this is the microfluidic maintenance of physiological equilibrium, or ‘microfluidic homeostasis’.

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