• Harris, Nick
• Rodamporn, S.
• Boltryk, R. J.
• Beeby, Steve
• Sanchez-Elsner, T.

Abstract

Sonoporation has been shown to have an important role in biotechnology for gene therapy and drug delivery. This paper presents a novel microfluidic sonoporation system that achieves high rates of cell transfection and cell viability by operating the sonoporation chamber at resonance. The paper presents a theoretical analysis of the resonant sonoporation chamber design, which achieves sonoporation by forming an ultrasonic standing wave across the chamber. A piezoelectric transducer (PZT 26) is used to generate the ultrasound and the different material thicknesses have been identified to give a chamber resonance at 980 kHz. The efficiency of the sonoporation system was determined experimentally under a range of sonoporation conditions and different exposures time (5, 10, 15, and 20 s, respectively) using HeLa cells and plasmid (peGFP-N1). The experimental results achieve a cell transfection efficiency of 68.9% (analysis of variance, ANOVA, <formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$p$</tex></formula> < 0.05) at the resonant frequency of 980 kHz at 100 V<formula formulatype="inline"><tex Notation="TeX">$_{{p-p}}$</tex></formula> (19.5 MPa) with a cell viability of 77% after 10 s of insonication.

Topics

• impedance spectroscopy
• ultrasonic
• forming