A tubing-free microfluidic wound-healing assay quantifying vascular smooth muscle cell migration

This paper presents a tubing-free microfluidic wound healing assay to quantify the migration of vascular smooth muscle cells (VSMCs). In this study, gravity was used to generate a laminar flow within microfluidic channels, enabling wound formation of VSMCs in a tubing-free manner. The effects of channel geometries (i.e., variations in channel height and PDMS based channel thickness) and chemokines (i.e., fetal bovine serum, platelet derived growth factor BB and tumor necrosis factor alpha) on the migration of VSMCs were investigated and compared. In addition, the proposed microfluidic platform was used to quantify the migration of two types of VSMCs (i.e., human aortic vascular smooth muscle cell line and primary human aortic vascular smooth cells). As a platform technology, this tubing-free microfluidic wound healing assay may function as a new model to study VSMC migration.