New Laser Technique Slashes Cancer Research Costs

In a move that slashes 90 percent of the cost of mass-producing metastatic microtumors and therapeutic microtissues for screening and research, Rice University bioengineers have adapted techniques from the 'maker' movement to reprogram a commercial laser cutter to etch up to 50,000 tiny 'microwells' per hour into sheets of silicone. The fabrication technique was developed with open-source software and hardware. The cost-saving microwell fabrication technique uses a commercial CO2 laser to fire millisecond laser pulses at a sheet of poly(dimethylsiloxane), a silicone-based organic and biocompatible polymer. "Microwells can be used to grow tiny clusters of cells," said Rice bioengineering researcher Jordan Miller, the lead researcher on the new study. "These clusters, or multicellular aggregates, contain 50-100 cells and have many potential applications, but they have been difficult to mass-produce."

Transcript

00:00:00 [Music] with this microfabrication project we're trying to figure out better ways to make microw Wells and we want to make microwells to be able to form clusters of cells maybe 50 100 cells per cluster these small clusters of cells have many potential applications in the field of cancer biology we want to model cancer microm metastases these are small micro

00:00:30 tumors that happen in cancer patients people trying to study how those convert from small microt tumors into large scale tumors that can threaten the patient and one way to produce these that we found is that we can create this conical well this microwell depression by firing a laser high energy into a single point you can see in the laser cutter when it's flashing across it's

00:00:55 like a Gatling gun little spouts of flame moving up and down this is where the laser is just individually focusing on each point it's blasting a bit of it out with this method we can create something that you can't achieve with a standard lithographic techniques so normally you can make uh square or cylindrical depressions but we can make these conical depressions that help

00:01:16 guide the cells into a single aggregate when we seed cells on top of these when we add cells to the Wells they just kind of seed inside and form an aggregate on top of themselves so this is really interdisciplinary research that we've been really excited to take part in so we're using um some knowledge of electrical engineering to override the

00:01:36 electronics of this laser cutter with Open Source Hardware and software then we have some biomaterials work that we're doing to fabricate these silicone membranes and culture them directly with cells there's a lot of Cell Biology and bioengineering we're doing to fabricate these tissues these micro cell Aggregates at very high throughput and then figure out ways to characterize

00:01:55 them we've added different zdepth to it where we can get different areas of laser so at the focal plane you have a small hole and then you can get larger larger diameter larger chronical depressions by changing the z-axis this is how we've expanded on the technology as well we are mass producing them way faster than anyone else we have we're producing again 50,000 microwells per

00:02:19 per hour normal technology you just it's called The Hanging drop method where most slabs you pipet individual each aggregate on top of a lid which is insanely insane amount of work