Development of a micro RNA extraction chip from human tumor cells

The importance of micro RNA analysis has been significantly increasing because the role of micro RNA in the human body has been gradually revealed. Despite its importance, the analysis has suffered from several troublesome pretreatments, which hamper any easy analysis. Therefore, an easy and high-throughput pretreatment method has been demanded. In this paper, we focused on the great advantages of microchip pretreatments over conventional manual pretreatments and developed a microchip for micro RNA extraction. To simplify microchip fabrication, we adopted poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) microchip and a silica membrane, which has rolls in RNA extraction fields. With silica membranes and the adhesion nature of PDMS, we could easily fabricate RNA extraction fields in the microchip. With this microchip, we successfully extracted micro RNA from cancer tumor cells. Though this is a preliminary experiment, and still has many improvement points, our device is expected to be applied for easy and fast micro RNA extraction from biological samples.