High-Throughput Acoustofluidic Fabrication of Tumor Spheroids

Three-dimensional (3D) culture of multicellular spheroids, offering a desirable biomimetic microenvironment, is appropriate for recapitulating tissue cellular adhesive complexity and revealing a more realistic drug response. However, current 3D culture methods are suffering from low-throughput, poor controllability, intensive-labor, and variation in spheroid size, thus not ready for many high-throughput screening applications including drug discovery and toxicity testing. Herein, we developed a high-throughput multicellular spheroid fabrication method using acoustofluidics. By acoustically-assembling cancer cells with low-cost and disposable devices, our method can produce more than 12 000 multicellular aggregates within several minutes and allow us to transfer these aggregates into ultra-low attachment dishes for long-term culture. This method can generate more than 6000 tumor spheroids per operation, and reduce tumor spheroid formation time to one day. Our platform has advantages in forming spheroids with high throughput, short time, and long-term effectiveness, and is easy-to-operation. This acoustofluidic spheroid assembly method provides a simple and efficient way to produce large numbers of uniform-sized spheroids for biomedical applications in translational medicine, pharmaceutical industry and basic life science research

Personalized antiplatelet therapy guided by clopidogrel pharmacogenomics in acute ischemic stroke and transient ischemic attack: A prospective, randomized controlled trial

Background: Clopidogrel is frequently used in patients with ischemic stroke or transient ischemic attack (TIA), but its efficacy is hampered by inter-individual variability, due to genetic differences associated with clopidogrel metabolism. We conducted this randomized controlled trial to validate whether the personalized antiplatelet therapy based on clopidogrel pharmacogenomics and clinical characteristics leads to better clinical outcomes compared with standard treatment.Methods: Patients were randomly divided into the standard group or pharmacogenetic group, in which the pharmacogenetic group required the detection of the genotyping of CYP2C19*2, CYP2C19*3, and CYP2C19*17. Patients were followed up for 90 days for the primary efficacy endpoint of new stroke events, secondary efficacy endpoint of individual or composite outcomes of the new clinical vascular events, and the incidence of disability. The primary safety outcome was major bleeding.Results: A total of 650 patients underwent randomization, among which 325 were in the pharmacogenomics group while 325 were in the standard group. Our study found after a 90-day follow-up, the risk of stroke and composite vascular events in the pharmacogenomics group was lower than that in the standard group. The incidence of disability significantly decreased in the pharmacogenomics group. In addition, no statistically significant differences were observed in bleeding events between the two groups.Conclusion: The present study demonstrates that personalized antiplatelet therapy guided by clopidogrel pharmacogenomics and clinical characteristics can significantly improve the net clinical benefit of ischemic stroke or TIA patients during the 90-day treatment period without increasing bleeding risk

Investigation on the Plasma-Induced Emission Properties of Large Area Carbon Nanotube Array Cathodes with Different Morphologies

Large area well-aligned carbon nanotube (CNT) arrays with different morphologies were synthesized by using a chemical vapor deposition. The plasma-induced emission properties of CNT array cathodes with different morphologies were investigated. The ratio of CNT height to CNT-to-CNT distance has considerable effects on their plasma-induced emission properties. As the ratio increases, emission currents of CNT array cathodes decrease due to screening effects. Under the pulse electric field of about 6 V/μm, high-intensity electron beams of 170–180 A/cm2 were emitted from the surface plasma. The production mechanism of the high-intensity electron beams emitted from the CNT arrays was plasma-induced emission. Moreover, the distribution of the electron beams was in situ characterized by the light emission from the surface plasma