Microfluidic device for cell screening and patch-clamp analysis

The purpose is to realize a Lab-On-Chip based device for cell screening and electrophysiological assay to introduce the Patch-Clamp as a routine clinical test. Patch-Clamping is the gold standard technique to investigate function and regulation of ion channels, specialized transmembrane proteins that play important roles in various physiological and pathological cell processes. The concept of ion channels as therapeutic targets or prognostic biomarkers attracts increasing interest, but the intrinsic limits of both traditional and automated patch-clamp technologies are a critical point for better understanding their roles in many diseases such as Channelopathies, Neurodegenerative diseases and Cancer . The aim of the project is to develop a polymeric chip, designed for planar patch-clamp, adapting it to pathological cell screening. Preliminary results show the possibility to realize a seal, a tight junction formed between the cell membrane and the planar pore. Starting from one micro/nano-structured master it is possible to produce many polymeric PolyDiMethylSiloxane (PDMS) replicas with well-defined geometry.