Towards personalized antibody cancer therapy: development of a microfluidic cell culture device for antibody selection

Abstract

Antibody therapy has been one of the most successful therapies for a wide range of diseases, including cancer. One way of expediting antibody therapy development is through phage display technology. Here, by screening thousands of randomly assembled peptide sequences, it is possible to identify potential therapeutic candidates. Conventional screening technologies do not accommodate perfusion through the system, as is the case of standard plate-based cultures. This leads to a poor translation of the experimental results obtained in vitro when moving to a more physiologically relevant setting, such as the case of preclinical animal models or clinical trials. Microfluidics is a technology that can improve screening efficacy by replicating more physiologically relevant conditions such as shear stress. In this work, a polydimethylsiloxane/polystyrene-based microfluidic system for a continuously perfused culture of cancer cells is reported. Human colorectal adenocarcinoma cells (HCT116) expressing CXCR4 were used as a cell target. Fluorescently labeled M13 phages anti-CXCR4 were used to study the efficiency of the microfluidic system as a tool to study the binding kinetics of the engineered bacteriophages. Using our microfluidic platform, we estimated a dissociation constant of 0.45 pM for the engineered phage. Additionally, a receptor internalization assay was developed using SDF-1α to verify phage specificity to the CXCR4 receptor. Upon receptor internalization there was a signal reduction, proving that the anti-CXCR4 fluorescently labelled M13 phages bound specifically to the CXCR4 receptor. The simplicity and ease of use of the microfluidic device design presented in this work can form the basis of a generic platform that facilitates the study and optimization of therapies based on interaction with biological entities such as mammalian cells.