Mass fabrication and delivery of 3D multilayer μtags into living cells

Abstract

Continuous monitoring of in vivo biological processes and their evolution at the cellular level would enable major advances in our understanding of biology and disease. As a stepping stone towards chronic cellular monitoring, we demonstrate massively parallel fabrication and delivery of 3D multilayer micro-Tags (μTags) into living cells. Both 10 μm × 10 μm × 1.5 μm and 18 μm × 7 μm × 1.5 μm devices containing inductive and capacitive structures were designed and fabricated as potential passive radio-frequency identification tags. We show cellular internalization and persistence of μTags over a 5-day period. Our results represent a promising advance in technologies for studying biology and disease at the cellular level.