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. 2019 Dec 2;9:18110. doi: 10.1038/s41598-019-54711-z

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© The Author(s) 2019

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

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U-well and plug-and-play culture design allowing for culturing various types of cancer cells and performing diverse culture techniques in a simple fashion. (a) The cancer cells can be directly seeded on the chamber side of the U-well using a pipette. (b) Once the cancer cells are seeded, these cells can attach to the porous membrane to form a mono-cell layer after incubation. (c) The cell-laden hydrogel can be pre-mixed with and loaded into the U-well to generate a 3D culture environment. (d) The microvascular endothelial cells can also be seeded on the channel side of the U-well to investigate the influence of shear stress. (e) The attached microvascular endothelial cells on the channel side of the U-well. (f) The cancer cells can be seeded before or after the seeding of microvascular endothelial cells to form a co-culture environment. (g) The U-well can be plugged into the metastasis chip housing directly to complete the metastasis chip. The inlet and outlet of the chip housing are connected to the perfusion system. (h) An image of the metastasis chip. Scale bar = 1 cm. (i) Schematic setup of the metastasis system with a collection device and a peristaltic pump allowing for the collection of the circulating tumor cells under dynamic flow conditions. (j) An image of metastasis system setup.