Continuous myeloma cell culture in storage chamber based on droplet fusion-division

This paper reports a continuous cell culture chip that employs droplet microfluidics to encapsulate suspension cells in a droplet and the cell droplet is passively stored in a storage chamber during the long-period cell culture process. The proposed system provides a closed micro-environment for cell culture which has advantages of cell droplet isolation to avoid cross contamination, simple droplet manipulation for fusion-division cycles and easy integration for further cell-based analytical techniques. In the demonstrated experiment, myeloma cells are successfully cultured using the developed integrated droplet cell culture system.