Microfluidics for immuno-oncology

This chapter summarizes the state-of-art of microfluidic technologies that can be used to analyze the key cell players during immunotherapy progression and resistance from the levels of isolated single cells and paired cell interactions. It discusses the progress of microfluidic Organs-on-Chips technologies to study the heterogeneity of immune cell interactions within a 3D tumor microenvironment and screen emerging immunotherapies in clinical trials. Microfluidic tumor models recapitulate the hallmark features of human tumor development and progression and can serve as useful clinical and preclinical tools for the study and modeling of the cancer-immune interactions in predicting and optimizing immuno-oncology therapeutic outcomes. Microfluidic methods enable the characterization of phenotypes and functions of various immune and cancer cells at a single-cell resolution. The potential for microfluidic tools to be implemented on larger, clinical scales outside the laboratory bench and into the clinical bedside have been notable sources of inspiration for much immuno-oncology research.