Single-Cell Microgels: Technology, Challenges, and Applications.

Single-cell-laden microgels effectively act as the engineered counterpart of the smallest living building block of life: a cell within its pericellular matrix. Recent breakthroughs have enabled the encapsulation of single cells in sub-100-μm microgels to provide physiologically relevant microniches with minimal mass transport limitations and favorable pharmacokinetic properties. Single-cell-laden microgels offer additional unprecedented advantages, including facile manipulation, culture, and analysis of individual cell within 3D microenvironments. Therefore, single-cell microgel technology is expected to be instrumental in many life science applications, including pharmacological screenings, regenerative medicine, and fundamental biological research. In this review, we discuss the latest trends, technical challenges, and breakthroughs, and present our vision of the future of single-cell microgel technology and its applications.

• Publication year

  2018

• Venue

  Trends in Biotechnology

• Publication date

  2018-08-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Materials Science, Engineering

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/j.tibtech.2018.03.001PMID 29656795
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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