Testing the sensitivity of patient-derived tumor cells ex vivo can potentially help determining the appropriate treatment for each patient and spot the development of resistance to a given therapy. The number of cells obtainable from a biopsy is, however, often insufficient for performing ex vivo tests in conventional microtiter plates. Here, we introduce a novel Droplet-Microarray platform based on a hydrophilic-superhydrophobic patterned surface that enables screenings using only 100 cells and 30 picomoles of a drug per individual nanoliter-sized droplet. We demonstrate that the dose–response of as few as 100 primary patient-derived chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells to anticancer compounds on the Droplet-Microarray platform resembles the dose–response obtained in 384-well plates requiring 20,000 tumor cells per experiment. The extremely miniaturized Droplet-Microarray platform thus carries great potential for ex vivo drug sensitivity and resistance tests on patient-derived tumor cells and potentially for implementing such tests in medical practice of precision medicine.

体外测试源自患者的肿瘤细胞的敏感性可能有助于确定每个患者的适当治疗方法并发现对给定疗法的耐药性的发展。然而，从活检中获得的细胞数量通常不足以在常规微量滴定板中进行离体测试。在这里，我们介绍了一种基于亲水-超疏水图案表面的新型液滴-微阵列平台，该平台能够对每个纳升大小的液滴仅使用 100 个细胞和 30 皮摩尔的药物进行筛选。我们证明，在 Droplet-Microarray 平台上，少至 100 个原发性患者来源的慢性淋巴细胞白血病 (CLL) 细胞对抗癌化合物的剂量反应类似于在每次实验需要 20,000 个肿瘤细胞的 384 孔板中获得的剂量反应。