Development of microfluidic tools to fabricate multicellular constructs and analyze their electromagnetic properties

Electroporation has many applications in the medical and pharmaceutical fields such as electrochemotherapy, gene therapy and genetic screening. However, a thorough understanding of the effect of electrical pulses on tissues requires consideration of cell organization, interactions and microenvironment. Therefore, current studies aiming at studying electroporation in vitro are not only conducted on cell suspensions but also on 3D models closer from tissues, such as cell spheroids. We present the development of microfluidic tools dedicated to the reproducible construction of such 3D cellular assemblies. This bottom-up approach should also enable to analyze how electromagnetic properties of multicellular constructs and of isolated cells relate to each other.