MICROFLUIDIC DEVICE FOR ANALYSIS OF RED BLOOD CELLS OF LABORATORY ANIMALS

Laboratory rats are the preferred model for studying many socially significant diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases (heart attack and hypertension), diabetes, and cancer. Pathological processes in red blood cells (RBCs) lead to violations of their deformability, which entails a deterioration in the gas transport function and a change in the micro-rheology of the blood. Recently, microfluidic devices have begun to be used to study the behavior of human RBCs in microcirculation conditions in vitro, which makes it possible to record, sort and study healthy and damaged cells. By microfluidic analysis, pathological changes at the molecular and membrane levels were linked with modifications of cell shape and motion in fluid flow. In such devices, it is possible to directly simulate the transport of RBCs in microcapillaries under blood microcirculation conditions and quantitatively analyze how different drugs affect it. In this work, we investigated how the topology and geometrical dimensions of the channels of a microfluidic device affect the possibility of determining the average velocity of rat and human RBCs. This allowed us to quantitatively estimate the influence of oxidative stress on RBC transport and biophysical properties. The кesults obtained showed that the optimal design of a microfluidic device contained 16 parallel microchannels with dimensions of 2.2 × 8 × 200 microns. In such microchannels, we accurately determined the speed of the single RBC of laboratory rats and humans, which moved under the microcirculation conditions, and identified the number of slow cells damaged by induced oxidative stress. The proposed method of simulation of blood microcirculation conditions in a microfluidic device has a broad range of applications and is aimed at studying the effects of oxidative stress on red blood cells in laboratory animals and humans, as well as monitoring the biophysical and functional properties of these cells in preclinical and clinical trials.