An Adhesive-Based Fabrication Technique for Culture of Lung Airway Epithelial Cells with Applications in Microfluidics and Lung-on-a-Chip

1 Abstract This work describes a versatile and cost-effective cell culture method for growing adherent cells on a porous membrane using pressure-sensitive double-sided adhesives. This technique allows cell culture using conventional methods and easy transfer to microfluidic chip devices. To support the viability of our system, we evaluate the toxicity effect of four different adhesives on two distinct airway epithelial cell lines and show functional applications for microfluidic cell culture chip fabrication. We showed that cells could be grown and expanded on a “floating” membrane, which can be transferred upon cell confluency to a microfluidic chip for further analysis. The viability of cells and their inflammatory responses to IL-1β stimulation was investigated. Such a technique would be useful to culture cells in a conventional fashion, which is more convenient and faster, and stimulate cells in an advanced model with perfusion when needed.