Separation of nasopharyngeal epithelial cells from carcinoma cells on 3D scaffold platforms

Scaffold microstructures were developed to mimic a three-dimensional extracellular matrix in studying cell migration and invasion. The multiple-layer scaffold platforms were designed to investigate cell migration and separation from top to bottom layer. Two cell lines including immortalized nasopharyngeal epithelial (NP460) cells and nasopharyngeal carcinoma (NPC43) cells with Epstein-Barr virus were compared in this study. On one-layer platforms with trench depth of 15 µm, both NP460 and NPC43 cells were guided to migrate along the 18-µm wide trenches, and exhibited random migration directions when the trench width was 10 or 50 µm. Nearly no cell was found to migrate in the 10-µm-wide trenches on one-layer platforms. However, the NP460 and NPC43 cells showed very different probability in the narrow trenches on two-layer platforms, making it possible to separate the nasopharyngeal epithelial cells from the carcinoma cells. Moreover, 1-µm deep grating topography on the top layer inhibited NP460 cells to migrate from top ridges to the 10-µm-wide trenches, but promoted such behavior for NPC43 cells. The results demonstrated in this work suggest that the engineered multiple-layer scaffold platforms could be used to separate carcinoma cells in NPC tumor as a potential treatment of NPC.