Cancer chips may help improve immunotherapy by recreating tumour environments in miniature systems that track immune cell behaviour more closely than standard models.
A new review found that microfluidic platforms, which use tiny channels etched into chips to control small amounts of fluid, are emerging as versatile tools for modelling tumour and immune interactions, evaluating immunotherapy efficacy and preparing immunotherapeutic agents for more personalised cancer treatment.
Cancer immunotherapy has changed how scientists think about treating cancer, but its benefits remain uneven, especially in solid tumours.
The challenge is that the tumour immune microenvironment, meaning the ecosystem around a tumour, is not static.
It is shaped by cancer cells, immune cells, stromal cells, cytokines, which are signalling proteins, and physical barriers.
Traditional animal models remain informative but are expensive, slow, ethically constrained and imperfect mirrors of human disease. Standard 2D systems such as Transwell assays are simpler and reproducible, but they cannot fully reproduce fluid dynamics, spatial organisation or the real-time immune pursuit of tumour cells.
Researchers from the Medical Research Center at Southern University of Science and Technology Hospital and the School of Medicine at Southern University of Science and Technology said chip-based models can track macrophage movement towards tumour cells under chemokine gradients, show how stromal barriers can block immune infiltration, and recreate vascular steps in cancer spread, such as cancer cells entering and leaving blood vessels.
Other systems capture differences between individual cells, including findings that not all natural killer cells, a type of immune cell, are equally effective at destroying cancer cells.
The review also highlights platforms for testing cellular therapies such as TCR-T, CAR-T and NK-cell approaches, as well as immune checkpoint blockade in patient-derived tissues, organoids and tumour fragments.
Beyond modelling, microfluidics can also be used to produce therapeutic components including NK-cell-containing porous microspheres, nanoparticles and engineered exosomes, which are tiny particles released by cells, designed to improve antigen presentation and immune activation.
The authors said that while no single laboratory platform can yet reproduce the full complexity of a living tumour environment, the next steps for the field should include better validation against in vivo tumours, closer comparison with clinical specimens, longer ex vivo culture times and more practical medium- to high-throughput systems for translational use.
In the near term, the researchers said microfluidic systems could help screen drug combinations faster, identify biomarkers more accurately and compare which patients are most likely to respond to immunotherapy.
Over time, the chips may support a more personalised oncology approach in which a patient’s own tumour tissue and immune cells are tested on-chip before treatment decisions are made.
The review also said pairing microfluidics with 3D printing, thermoplastic manufacturing and artificial intelligence could speed up commercialisation and data interpretation.
