Integration of living cells into microsystems technology

Provides an overview of some of the key advances and remaining challenges related to the combination of microfabrication technology and living cells and a sampling of a broad spectrum of exciting opportunities and promises in biology and medicine. Microfabrication techniques that have revolutionized the electronics industry, are now poised to revolutionize the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, and biomedical device industries. The two leading applications of microfabrication in biology include "genes-on-a-chip" to monitor the expression level of potentially all genes in humans or various model systems and organisms simultaneously, and "lab-on-a-chip" type devices to perform biochemistry in microchambers. Equally exciting is the fact that biomedical application of microfabricated devices is no longer limited to non-living systems such as genes-on-a-chip or lab-on-a-chip. Recent advances in the understanding of cellular behavior in microenvironments have started to pave the way towards living micro-devices. The ability to integrate cells with microdevices is important for controlling cellular interactions on a sub-cellular level, for obtaining highly parallel, statistically meaningful readouts over large cell populations, and for miniaturizing instrumentation towards minimally-invasive, portable, fast, inexpensive devices. The rich assortment of living microdevices that can be built using bioMEMS techniques have important applications in fundamental cell biological studies, tissue engineering, cell separation and culture devices, diagnostics, and high-throughput drug screening tools.