A Microfluidic Biochip Dedicated to Highly Parallelized Electrofusion

This paper deals with the development of a biochip dedicated to fusion between two types of cells, in a highly parallelized way. The fusion process is initiated by an electric field pulse applied to cells paired in fluidic traps. The paper will present different strategies for the capture and pairing of cells prior to the electrofusion, combining fluidic and electrical forces. The design is highly parallelized in order to fulfill our objective which is the high throughput production of hybrid cells. The microfabrication process is described. Experimental results confirm the efficiency of the proposed device for cell trapping, pairing and fusion.