Development of cell fixation biochip for atomic force microscope

In PC3 human prostate cancer cells, it has reported that experimental results with several doses of epidermal growth factor (EGF) showed abnormal dose-dependency of activation of EGF receptor (EGFR). Although the mechanism is still unknown, we proposed a hypothetic model that explains the abnormal response of EGFR in PC3 cells in the earlier study. Since the key hypothesis in our model is based on the existence of receptor raft, which is a cluster of receptors, on cell membrane, we tried an imaging of receptors on cell membrane as a verification experiment by using atomic force microscope (AFM). However, cell fixation on glass plate by collagen adhesion was too unstable to adequately image the sample in a case of measurement with PC3 cells, which motivated us to establish a cell fixation method for PC3 cells. In this study, we propose a cell fixation biochip to physically fix cells without any chemical adhesion by using Micro Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS). In this paper, we show a preliminary results for our biochip in which PC3 cells are successfully captured among SU-8 pillars constructed on a glass plate.