Background What We Can Offer? Workflow Why Choose Us? Published Data FAQs Featured Services Feature Products
Accelerate Your Research and Development!
Are you currently facing long drug development cycles, challenges in analyzing cellular heterogeneity, or difficulty in isolating rare cell populations? Our Microfluidic Chip Development Service helps you accelerate drug discovery, obtain high-resolution individual celll data, and streamline complex biological workflows through advanced microfluidic technology.
Contact our team to get an inquiry now!
Background
Every cell is unique, and while population-level data is useful, it fails to capture the crucial variations between individual cells. This cellular heterogeneity is fundamental to key biological processes, from cancer progression to immune responses and embryonic development. Individual cell analysis offers a powerful way for researchers to study organisms that cannot be cultured and gain deep insights into cell differentiation. The advancement of these techniques is therefore vital. The development of individual celll analysis methods is critical for disease diagnosis and drug discovery. While techniques like flow cytometry offer high throughput, they can be damaging to fragile cells. Microfluidic technology overcomes these limitations by combining high throughput and gentle cell handling with an automated, integrated system capable of real-time detection. Microfluidic chip analysis relies on various driving forces, such as electroosmotic flow. In microchannels made of materials like glass, silicon, or plastic, an electric field drives fluid movement, enabling the rapid and precise separation of complex samples based on the distinct mobility of ions and molecules.
Fig.1 Microfluidic individual celll analysis.1,3
Applications
The applications of microfluidic platforms for individual celll analysis are vast and continually expanding, providing new avenues for research and discovery.
Individual Cell Omics
Our chips are ideal for individual celll proteomics and genomics, enabling the high-throughput analysis of gene expression, protein profiles, and genetic variations at the individual cell level.
Rare Cell Isolation
The precision of our platforms allows for the efficient isolation and analysis of rare cell populations, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) and stem cells, which are often overlooked in traditional bulk assays.
Drug Screening
Microfluidic chips can be used to perform high-throughput drug screening on individual cells or cellular arrays, providing detailed insights into cellular responses to therapeutics and identifying effective drug candidates.
Cell-Cell Interaction Studies
Our platforms enable the co-culture and precise spatial control of different cell types, allowing for the study of complex cellular interactions, such as those within the tumor microenvironment or in immune responses.
Organ-on-a-Chip
We assist in developing sophisticated microfluidic systems that mimic the functions of human organs, providing a physiologically relevant platform for disease modeling and toxicology studies.
What We Can Offer
Creative Biolabs provides a comprehensive suite of products and services to meet your microfluidics needs. We offer customizable solutions that integrate seamlessly with your existing laboratory infrastructure.
We provide a complete solution from initial conceptualization and CAD design to the fabrication of high-quality chips from a variety of materials including PDMS, glass, and silicon.
We offer a range of pre-designed microfluidic chips for common applications, providing a quick solution for your research needs.
We offer a full-service package that includes chip development, device integration, and experimental validation, ensuring a smooth and efficient transition to microfluidic technology.
Leverage our specialized benefits—Request a quotation today
Workflow
Why Choose Us?
Choosing Creative Biolabs means gaining a partner dedicated to the success of your individual celll research. Our commitment to innovation, quality, and customer collaboration sets us apart, ensuring that you receive a solution that not only meets your needs but exceeds your expectations.
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Unparalleled Precision & Control: Our chips enable precise manipulation of individual cells and reagents in picoliter volumes, providing a level of control that is impossible with bulk methods.
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High-Throughput Analysis: Our platforms are engineered for high-throughput individual celll encapsulation and sorting, dramatically accelerating your research and enabling large-scale studies.
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Significant Cost Reduction: By miniaturizing assays, our microfluidic chips drastically reduce the consumption of expensive reagents, leading to substantial cost savings. Published data demonstrates our ability to reduce reagent usage by up to 99% compared to conventional methods.
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A "One-Stop Solution": We manage the entire process from initial design to final fabrication and validation, providing you with a single, reliable point of contact and an integrated, seamless experience.
Published Data
Fig.2 Schematic of microfluidic chip for individual celll analysis with 1026 individual chambers.2,3
A microfluidic method developed by Lucas Armbrecht et al. demonstrates the power of individual celll protein analysis. Their chip, featuring 1026 picoliter-scale chambers, enables the highly sensitive and multiplexed analysis of secreted proteins. The core of the technology relies on a magnetic-based trapping mechanism where superparamagnetic beads, attached to both cells and barcodes, are precisely directed into the capture wells using an external magnet. This technique was successfully used to establish distinct protein expression profiles for GAPDH, Gal-3, and Gal-3bp across three different cell lines (MCF-7, HEK-293T, and SK-BR-3), effectively showcasing its ability to differentiate between cell populations and reveal cellular heterogeneity with high precision.
FAQs
Q: What is the core principle that allows microfluidic chips to analyze single cells with such precision?
A: The fundamental principle is compartmentalization. Microfluidic chips create a miniaturized, highly controlled environment that isolates individual cells. This is achieved through methods like droplet encapsulation or physical trapping mechanisms, which prevent the "averaging" effect of bulk assays. By isolating cells, researchers can precisely manipulate their microenvironment and analyze each cell's unique characteristics, which is crucial for understanding cellular heterogeneity in fields like cancer biology and immunology.
Q: How do microfluidic chips enable multi-omics analysis at the individual celll level?
A: Microfluidic platforms are designed to integrate multiple sequential steps on a single chip, such as cell isolation, lysis, and subsequent amplification of genetic material or detection of proteins. This integrated workflow prevents sample loss and contamination, while the small volumes enable complex assays with minimal starting material and reagents, making it feasible to profile the genome, transcriptome, and proteome from the same cell.
Q: What are the key advantages of using microfluidic technology for individual celll research compared to traditional methods?
A: Microfluidic platforms offer several advantages over bulk methods like flow cytometry. They provide superior control over the cellular microenvironment, enabling time-lapse studies and complex cell-cell interaction experiments. Microfluidics also facilitates precise manipulation of individual cells for "omics" applications, and systems are far more sample-efficient and cost-effective, using significantly less volume and expensive reagents.
Q: How can microfluidic platforms be used to study dynamic cellular processes?
A: The ability to precisely position and culture single cells on a chip makes microfluidic technology ideal for studying cell-cell interactions, communication, and dynamic processes. Researchers can create controlled gradients of signaling molecules to observe cellular migration, or co-culture different cell types to model organ systems or immune responses. The optical transparency of common chip materials allows for continuous, real-time imaging of these processes.
Q: How does microfluidic technology help in the analysis of rare cells?
A: Microfluidic chips address the challenge of isolating rare cells from complex biological fluids with their high-throughput and high-efficiency sorting capabilities. They can be engineered to selectively capture or enrich rare cells, such as circulating tumor cells (CTCs) or fetal cells, which significantly increases the probability of finding and analyzing these clinically significant cells.
Featured Services
Feature Products
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CAT No
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Material
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Product Name
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Application
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MFCH-001
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Glass
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Herringbone Microfluidic Chip
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Processing samples and reagents in nucleic acid analysis, blood analysis, immunoassays and point-of-care diagnostics.
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MFMM-0723-JS12
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Glass
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Double Emulsion Droplet Chip
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Our double emulsion microfluidic chip, incorporating localized modifications and a classic flow-focusing structure, is specifically designed to generate stable and uniform double emulsion droplets.
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MFCH-005
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PDMS
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3D Cell Culture Chip-Neuron
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Neuron cell culture and study of axon transport, axon protein synthesis, axon damage/regeneration, signal transduction of axon to somatic signal.
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MFCH-009
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PDMS
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Synvivo-Idealized Co-Culture Network Chips (IMN2 radial)
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SynBBB 3D Blood Brain Barrier Model/SynRAM 3D Inflammation Model/SynTumor 3D Cancer Model/SynTox 3D Toxicology Model
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MFMM1-GJS4
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COC
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BE-Doubleflow Standard
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Studying circulating particles, cell interactions and simple organ on chip system construction.
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MFMM1-GJS6
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COC
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BE-Transflow Custom
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Used to construct cell interface or Air-Liquid interface (ALI) to study more complex culture systems.
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Click here to explore our complete product catalog.
For detailed inquiries regarding our offerings, reach out to our specialists.
References
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Jammes, Maerki, et al. " How individual celll immunology is benefiting from microfluidic technologies." Microsyst Nanoeng 6 (2020): 45. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-020-0140-8
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Armbrecht, Lucas et al. "Individual cell protein profiling in microchambers with barcoded beads." Microsystems & nanoengineering vol. 5 55. 4 Nov. 2019, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41378-019-0099-5
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Distributed under Open Access license CC BY 4.0, without modification.
