Materials

Cyclo olefin polymer (COP) and cyclic olefin copolymer (COC) are our choice material for all our products. These medical-grade plastics are an optimal material for Organ on chip and life science applications.

• Impermeability: These materials have a very low permeability to oxygen and water vapor, allowing precise control of those gases inside the microchannel by controlling their concentration in the culture medium and its flux. In fact, it is possible to perform hypoxia experiments inside our chips, by carefully controlling those parameters.

• No unespecific adsorption issues: Other widely used compounds for OoC production such as PDMS suffer from unspecific absorption making them unusable for drug testing experiments. COP and COC are lipophobic materials that doesn’t present this issue, allowing their use in drug development and diffusion experiments.

• Optical properties: COP and COC are outstanding optical properties. These materials offer transparency in the visible and near UV range, low birefringence, high Abbe number, making these materials ideal for microscopy applications.

• Good chemical and heat resistance: COP and COC present remarkable chemical resistance to acids and even polar solvents. In addition, these compounds present a high glass transition temperature, in some formulations close to 190 °C.

• Mass production: Beonchip´s products are manufactured by thermoplastic injection, assuring reproducibility between batches and allowing high volume production without compromising their quality.

Easy to use

Beonchip´s devices are designed aiming for maximum ease of use and versatility.

All our products are designed in slide format maximizing its comfortable use under all microscope configurations.

All our products include lateral wall for easy handling and protecting the reservoirs and inlets from contact with the gloves.

Microfluidic chambers, wells and channels in our devices match 96 well plate positions. Hence, our microfluidic chips are compatible with automated microscopy.

In order to facilitate the use of our chips in a rocker and simplify the microfluidic tube arrangement, we have designed a holder for our chips. In addition, the lateral dimensions of the holder match the dimensions of a commercial well plate and can be covered with its lid to assure no contamination of the cultures during the experiments.

Microfluidic compatibility

Beonchip´s microfluidic connections are designed to be used with any type of microfluidic control system such as syringe pumps, peristaltic pumps or pressure-based flow control systems. We can provide adaptors for our chips, that are compatible with Luer or barb connections of your flow control system.

Microscopy

The materials used for the fabrication of the devices have excellent optical properties. Their high transparency and low auto-fluorescence allows to monitor experiments not only with inverted phase contrast, fluorescence and confocal microscopy but also for more detail images using immersion objectives is possible.

2D culture BE-Flow

Be-Flow. T24 cells. Brightfield.

3D culture BE-Gradient

U87 high concentration 3D culture. Confocal microscopy.

Be-Transflow

HCT-GFP 2D culture on the membrane. Fluorescence microscopy.

3D culture BE-Transflow

Recreation of epidermis and dermis in Be-Transflow (on the membrane). Above, in blue, HEKa keratinocyte nuclei forming the epidermis on a collagen hydrogel. Below, in red, dermal fibroblasts immersed in a collagen matrix mimicking the dermal layer. Confocal microscopy.

Complete solution

Pressure-based systems provide the most responsive and stable flow control among the microfluidic flow control systems. Therefore, we have joined forces with the European leader in this technology, the French company Fluigent, to give you the optimal solution to your microfluidic needs. Organize a meeting with our operations team to select the best chip, microfluidic flow control system and connections for your applications and take advantage of this unique opportunity to boost your biomedical research.

Cell seeding procedure

Seeding Beonchip devices is very simple. Every channel inlet well has a hole where the P-100 tips perfectly fit (Be-Flow and Be-doubleFlow devices are simetric hence inlet and outlet wells depend on your preference). Once the tip is placed into the hole, inject your cells or coating mixture through the channel until the end of it.

Another way to proceed is to pipette the mixture of medium with cells in the inlet well and let the liquid to flow by itself through the channel until it reaches the outlet well.

After the time needed by your cells for attachment, add more medium in the inlet, outlet and medium reservoirs and incubate under your experiment conditions.

Be aware not to let the medium inside the channel evaporate. To prevent this, add water or PBS to the evaporation reservoir.

In the case of a matrix coating, after time incubation, wash the channel by adding PBS into the inlet well and recover it at the outlet channel with the pipette. You may tilt the device manually in order to make the PBS flow several times from one reservoir to another before you remove it.

Extraction

Cell recovery from the devices for downstream applications is possible. After removing medium and washing with PBS, perfuse your choice cell detachment solution and incubate the time needed. Neutralize your solution by adding an inactivator to the reservoirs. You may tilt the device manually so that it is well mixed. Also, you may resuspend actively the liquid with the tip in the inlet/outlet well hole to help cell detachment. Check under the microscope. Finally, collect your cells aspirating all the liquid inside the device.