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The minimal invasive percutaneous microwave ablation (MWA) combined with immunotherapy is a promising technique in clinic for the treatment of primary and metastatic tumors. However, elaborate encapsulation carrier designs, complex cellular engineering, and poor applicability are the vexing problems difficult to solve currently. Herein, a general strategy was proposed for the design of an injectable microwave-sensitive immune hydrogel for combined MWA and immunotherapy in vivo for the first time. The mix-and-use hydrogel composed Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved components were fabricated by introducing various immunostimulants regardless of hydrophilicity and hydrophobicity into the alginate (ALG)-Ca2+ hydrogel. As a proof of concept, an immunoadjuvant (R837) was employed to synthesize the R837-ALG-hydrogel for systematic studies. This immune hydrogel owns ultra-facile synthesis process, good microwave-sensitivity, adjuvant encapsulation efficiency of nearly 100%, good biocompatibility and syringeability, and large-scale production capability, which could be easily injected into the primary tumor for enhancing MWA. Moreover, the loaded R837 could motivate in situ vaccination by making the utmost of the tumor-associated antigens released after MWA, thereby inducing the robust tumor-specific antitumor immunity to suppress the distant metastatic tumor in vivo. The proposed injectable microwave-sensitive immune hydrogel paves a facile but general avenue with great clinical translation potential for the minimal invasive personalized oncotherapy.

Effective mixing is vitally important to many microfluidic devices in the areas of biotechnical industries, analytic chemistry and medical industries. However, most micro-mixers require complicated fabrication procedures, possibly inappropriate for practical microfluidic utilization. These mixers generally operate under low Reynolds-number conditions, causing a relatively long reaction time in various biochemical processes. This study presents a novel hemisphere-shaped vortex mixer to rapidly mix two liquids with simple geometric configuration. To simulate mixing behavior, computational analysis is based on the transient three-dimensional conservation equations of mass, momentum and species concentration. The test flow are treated as laminar, incompressible, miscible, uniform-property flows with insignificant gravity and temperature variation effects over the calculation domain. Considering the proposed mixer concurrently actuated by two finger-pressed pumps without electrical power, both experimental and simulation results show an intense swirling eddy generated in the core region of mixing chamber, achieving a mixing index up to 93% in a one-shot mixing event.