A 3D tumor spheroid chip with the pharmacokinetic drug elimination model developed by balanced droplet dispensing

This paper presents a three-dimensional (3D) tumor spheroid chip where the pharmacokinetic (PK) drug elimination model is developed by balanced droplet dispensing. The PK model should reflect the exponential decrease of drug concentration in a body to improve the reliability of cell-based screening assay. The previous cell chips, however, maintain the concentration of anti-cancer agents at constant or discretely decrease the concentration level by manual process. In the present chip where medium droplet dispensers are integrated on a well array, the small droplets of fresh medium and well waste are autonomously replaced each other, the exponential elimination of drug concentration in the well is provided. In the experimental study, we demonstrated that the present chip successfully develops the exponential elimination model using fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) and cisplatin. Although the exponential decay of cisplatin in the present chip did not show significant effect biologically due to the current protocol where 3 days of constant concentration pre-treatment is performed, we observed different growth pattern of H358 spheroids depending on peak concentration of 0, 1, 10, and 100 μM. The present chip has potential for analyzing the response of 3D tumor spheroids in the pharmacokinetically relevant drug elimination model for high-reliability spheroid-based drug screening chip.