Wound healing assay in a low-cost microfluidic platform

Cell migration is a very important stage in different pathological processes such as wound healing, vascularisation, immune response, tissue regeneration and cancer. Traditional wound healing assays are done by scratching a monolayer on standard culture surfaces. However this method can lead to data misinterpretation and poor comparability in results from different experiments. The microfluidic wound healing assay is a mature alternative to the traditional method, but it is expensive and bulky due to the need of syringe pumps and can be difficult to implement by the end user. Here we show an alternative low-cost microfluidic platform based on the MainSTREAM platform. We also demonstrate the feasibility of a microperistaltic pump to carry out these kind of assays. A laminar flow of PBS-Trypsin-PBS confined in a microfluidic channel with a previously cultured monolayer of IIB-Mel LES melanoma cells was used to generate the wound. Cell migration rate could be quantified successfully.