MEMS microwell and microcolumn arrays: novel methods for high-throughput cell-based assays.

Although the cell-based assay is becoming more popular for high throughput drug screening and the functional characterization of disease-associated genes, most researchers in these areas do not use it because it is a complex and expensive process. We wanted to create a simple method of performing an on-chip cell-based assay. To do this, we used micro-electro-mechanical systems (MEMS) to fabricate a microwell array chip comprised of a glass substrate covered with a photoresist film patterned to form multiple microwells and tested it in two reverse transfection experiments, an exogenous gene expression study and an endogenous gene knockdown study. It was used effectively in both. Then, using the same MEMS technology, we fabricated a complementary microcolumn array to be used as a drug carrier device to topically apply drugs to cells cultured in the microwell array. We tested the effectiveness of microwell-microcolumn on-chip cell-based assay by using it in experiments to identify epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) activity inhibitors, for which it was found to provide effective high throughput and high content functional screening. In conclusion, this new method of cell-based screening proved to be a simple and efficient method of characterizing gene function and discovering drug leads. This journal is © The Royal Society of Chemistry 2011