Microfluidic device due to its characteristic of microscale has several advantages including small reagents consumption, fast analysis, ease of integration and miniaturization, high degree of automation. It has been widely used in several areas, such as analytical chemistry and life science. This work focused on the urgent requirement of cell analysis in the field of life sciences, and the aim of solving the problems in traditional cell analysis methods. 1). A microfluidic device for the imitation of drug metabolism in human liver and its cytotoxicity on cells was developed. To verify the feasibility of the integrated microchip, we studied uridine 5’-diphosphate-glucuronosyltransferase (UGT) metabolism of acetaminophen (AP) and the cytotoxicity of products on HepG2 cells. The products of the reaction in one region were injected into the cell culture chamber for cytotoxicity assay, while those in another region were directly detected online with an electrospray ionization quadrupole time-of-flight mass spectrometer after micro-SPE pre-treatment. The results demonstrated that the established platform could be used to imitate drug metabolism occurring in the human liver, thereby replacing animal experiments in the near future. 2). A “Surface Tension Valve” was designed on the microdevice to control cell communication. Contrast to reported method, we used continues incubation, which was closer to the human environment, instead of static incubation. The combined system was proven to be useful for high-throughput MS detection of signaling and the final metabolites, which were very important for cell communication research.

This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 91213305, 20935002).