Microfluidic devices provide a means to effectively and efficiently deliver a plethora of fluids in discrete, small volumes, or continuous low volumetric flow rates, to specific sites within a microfluidic device, reducing the amount of culture media and reagents required for cell culture and enabling parallel evaluation. In addition, microfluidic channels can be used to deliver cells to specific sites, reducing the amount of manual manipulation of cells, and to deliver various labeling agents to cell sites, reducing the amount of time and manual manipulation required to label and analyze cell responses.

     Our group exploits a unique device fabrication scheme based on living radical photopolymerizations. My research specifically focuses on demonstrating the particular benefits of the versatility of the chemistry to design biomaterial devices for 3D cell culture, manipulation and analysis. Microfluidic channels are used to deliver culture media and various reagents to cell sites and also to remove waste products generated by the cells. Three dimensional porous biomaterial scaffolds are covalently incorporated into the devices and used as cell culture sites. It is expected that the channels will also be used to deliver various analytical reagents to cell sites, to allow for on-device analysis of cell response to the various reagents.