Invited Talk

Integrated optofluidic devices for cancer cell analysis and imaging

National Research Council (CNR) - Institute for Photonics and Nanotechnologies (IFN), P.zza L. da Vinci 32, 20133 Milano - Italy

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Current frontier of cellular biology is the manipulation, analysis and sorting of single cells. Populations of cells in culture and in organisms, although considered nominally identical, often present some heterogeneity that poses a severe challenge for many experimental measurements. In fact, differences among cells of the same population may unravel the complexity of many biological phenomena. Single cell analysis and sorting are powerful tools for the selection of a small group of cells of interest out of a wide and heterogeneous population, such as blood samples, cells from resected tumors or in vitro cultures; the goal of such analysis being the diagnosis of pathological disorders or the separation of specific cells for further analysis.
In recent years, considerable effort has been devoted to the development of integrated and low-cost optofluidic devices able to handle single cells. Such devices usually rely on microfluidic circuits that guarantee a controlled flow of the cells with optical radiations often exploited to probe or manipulate the cells under test. Among the different microfabrication technologies, femtosecond laser micromachining (FLM) [1] is ideally suited for this purpose as it provides the integration of both microfluidic and optical functions on the same glass chip leading to monolithic, perfectly aligned, robust and portable optofluidic devices.
Here we present some integrated optofluidic devices for cell studies, which combine microfluidic and optical technologies to implement the following functionalities in monolithic chips: mechanical phenotyping at the single cell level by optical stretching [2]; optical sorting triggered by fluorescence signals [3] or mechanical response [4]; high-throughput 3D optical imaging by light-sheet microscopy on-chip [5].