Source: Brown University (October 7, 2026). AI-generated summary by biochip.com, published . Not independently reviewed.
Key takeaways
- Brown engineers built a half-inch microchip with one million microscale electrodes to track cells through electrical capacitance.
- Laboratory tests tracked human breast cancer cells, cell division, multicellular spheroids, and honeycomb tissues containing hundreds of thousands of cells.
- The work does not establish performance across broader cell types, clinical samples, or real-world diagnostic settings.
Brown University engineers have built a microchip for tracking cell movement electrically, rather than through lenses and fluorescent dyes. The half-inch-wide device contains an array of one million microscale electrodes that detects how cells touch its surface as they move. In laboratory tests, it tracked human breast cancer cells, recorded cell division, and mapped movement at the edges of multicellular clusters. The approach could offer a portable, less disruptive way to study cell migration, a process central to cancer spread, wound repair, and immune responses.
Turning Cell Contact Into an Image
Most cell imaging depends on optical microscopes, often with fluorescent dyes that make cells easier to see. But moving cells change shape quickly, and labeling them with dyes can create problems. Hyuntae Jeong, a postdoctoral research associate at Brown's School of Engineering and co-first author, noted that fluorescent dyes can damage DNA, alter cell movement, or cause cell death.
Brown's system takes a different route. Cells sit in a liquid nutrient solution on top of a square microchip. As a cell grips the chip's surface and migrates, it changes the local electrical capacitance, a measure of how a surface stores electrical charge.
A Fingerprint Scanner Analogy
Jacob Rosenstein, an associate professor of engineering who co-led the work, compares the technique to a fingerprint scanner. Such scanners can distinguish the raised ridges of a fingerprint from the spaces between them because the two areas produce different capacitance signals.
Here, the chip distinguishes areas where a cell touches the surface from areas where it does not. Repeated measurements across the electrode array create a time-lapse view of each cell's changing position and shape, without relying on light sources, lenses, or dyes.
Testing Cancer Cells and Tissue Models
The team reported the work in Lab on a Chip. In laboratory experiments, the researchers successfully tracked human breast cancer cell motion and captured cell division as it happened.
The system also imaged multicellular spheroids, compact three-dimensional clusters of cells. It captured the behavior of leader cells at the outer edge of those clusters as they began moving outward. These edge cells can be important in understanding how groups of cells collectively migrate.
In another demonstration, the device imaged honeycomb tissues containing hundreds of thousands of cells. The measurements resolved voids and boundaries created by complex changes in tissue shape, indicating that the large sensor area can follow structures that extend beyond a typical microscope field of view.
Why This Matters
Cell migration is a basic biological behavior with major medical consequences. Cancer cells must move to metastasize, immune cells travel to sites of infection or injury, and cells migrate to close wounds. A system that observes this movement without fluorescent labels may reduce the risk that the observation method itself changes the behavior under study.
The chip's broad sensing area could also avoid stitching together many optical images to cover a large tissue sample. Rosenstein said the absence of lenses, light sources, and other optical hardware makes the system small and lightweight, while co-lead investigator Ian Y. Wong said the capacitance images can be tracked automatically with less image-processing adjustment than fluorescence microscopy.
What Comes Next
The researchers say the device could be mass produced at relatively low cost and transported more easily than conventional microscopes. Future work will determine how broadly the platform can be used across cell types, tissue models, and experimental settings. For now, the study establishes an all-electrical way to watch cells move while keeping the imaging hardware unusually compact.
Topics: Cancer
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