Standardized, modular microfluidic building blocks for automated cell culturing systems

We report an emerging toolkit of modular and standardized MicroFluidic Building Blocks (MFBB) to ultimately form a versatile and automated system on a Fluidic Circuit Board (FCB) for high-throughput cell culturing and screening assays. The toolkit is composed of four different MFBBs to meet a total of four different purposes: (1) a metering and mixing MFBB for upstream sample preparation, (2) a gut-on-a-chip MFBB for increased biological complexity, (3) a 64-chamber MFBB for multiplexed cell culturing, and (4) a cell-in-droplet encapsulation MFBB for downstream analysis preparation.