Cancer metastasis is the process in which cancer cells developed in the primary tumor start to spread in the body through bloodstream or lymphatic systems and home in on secondary sites, where they may generate new tumors. At the first stage, individual cancer cells migrate through narrow confined nanometric spaces or channels of micrometric interstitial spaces. It is thus challenging to create synthetic environments that mimic in vivo characteristics, fabricating relevant biosystems along with imaging techniques for sub-cellular visualization in order to understand mechanism of cancer cell migration, in particular in confining environments. Femtosecond laser assisted chemical etching (FLAE) is a technology performing subtractive processing of glass in order to create 3D microfluidic structures embedded in a microchip with the micrometric feature size. We evaluate herein relevant glass platforms capable to offer both observation of collective cancer cells migration over long periods and individual visualization at unicellular and subcellular levels on the target cell. Glass microfluidic biochips with micrometric characteristics are first fabricated by FLAE, hosting in vivo like microenvironments. Then, by applying two photon polymerization one may generate biomimetic polymeric architectures with confining channels inside microchannels. The fabricated 3D glass nanofluidics is applied to observe behavior of cancer cell deformation and migration in narrow spaces, providing new findings.
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