A Microfluidic Vascular Chip for in Vitro Studying Responses of Anti-cancer Drugs

Recently, microfluidic chips have been used extensively in studies to validate the efficacy of anti-cancer drugs in vitro. However, in most existing approaches, the drug applies directly to the tumor cells, which is not a real representation of how the drug is delivered in vivo. Most drugs are delivered into the tissue space via the vascular system in vivo. The direct mode of action in vitro may cause the assessed effect of the drug to differ from that in vivo. To overcome the limitation of the lack of blood vessels in existing methods, this study presents a vascularized microfluidic chip to study cancer drug response by simulating in vivo drug delivery through blood vessels. The result shows that the presence of blood vessels reduces the effectiveness of the drug on tumor cells. Therefore, the effect of blood vessels on drug response is not negligible.