Cell Migration Assays and Their Application to Wound Healing Assays—A Critical Review
Open accessAbstract
In recent years, cell migration assays (CMAs) have emerged as a tool to study the migration of cells along with their physiological responses under various stimuli, including both mechanical and bio-chemical properties. CMAs are a generic system in that they support various biological applications, such as wound healing assays. In this paper, we review the development of the CMA in the context of its application to wound healing assays. As such, the wound healing assay will be used to derive the requirements on CMAs. This paper will provide a comprehensive and critical review of the development of CMAs along with their application to wound healing assays. One salient feature of our methodology in this paper is the application of the so-called design thinking; namely we define the requirements of CMAs first and then take them as a benchmark for various developments of CMAs in the literature. The state-of-the-art CMAs are compared with this benchmark to derive the knowledge and technological gap with CMAs in the literature. We will also discuss future research directions for the CMA together with its application to wound healing assays.
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The reliability and reproducibility of the wound healing assay can be severely impacted by many factors if they are not adequately controlled.
“several articles highlight an increasing number of factors that can severely impact the reliability and reproducibility of the assay, if they are not adequately controlled [38,39,40,41,42]”
From Optimized Wound Healing Assay to Study Extracellular Vesicle-Driven Glioblastoma Cell Migration (2026) · cites this paper as [38]
Protocols involving extracellular vesicles and glioblastoma cells are particularly poorly validated.
“with protocols involving EVs and GB cells being particularly poorly validated.”
From Optimized Wound Healing Assay to Study Extracellular Vesicle-Driven Glioblastoma Cell Migration (2026) · cites this paper as [38]
The Discussion, §3.1, describes consistency problems in cell-migration assays generally, but does not assess validation of protocols involving extracellular vesicles or glioblastoma cells. Searches for those terms and for protocol validation found only an extracellular-vesicles title in the References, not the claimed comparison. (LLM, conf=0.74)
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“Despite its widespread use, several articles highlight an increasing number of factors that can severely impact the reliability and reproducibility of the assay, if they are not adequately controlled [38–42], with protocols involving EVs and GB cells being particularly poorly validated.”
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- Authors
- Yang, C., Yin, D., Zhang, H., Badea, I., Yang, S.-M., & Zhang, W.
- Affiliations
- Donghua University (CN)
- East China University of Science and Technology (CN)
- College of Pharmacy and Nutrition, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK S7N 5A9, Canada
- Shanghai University (CN)
- Corresponding author
- Yang, Shih-Mo
- Zhang, Wenjun
- Venue
- Micromachines
- Publisher
- MDPI AG
- Published
- 2024-05-29
- Volume
- 15
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 720
- ISSN
- 2072-666X (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC11205366
- OpenAlex
- W4399286680
- Cited by
- 22
- References
- 127
- Citations by year
- 2026: 9 · 2025: 10 · 2024: 3
- FWCI
- 0.96
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Micromachines (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) CREATE (Collaborative Research and Training Experience) (565429-2022)
- Topics
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Rehabilitation › Wound Healing and Treatments
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Cell Biology › Cellular Mechanics and Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Engineering › Biomedical Engineering › 3D Printing in Biomedical Research
- Keywords
- cell migration assay, wound healing assay, cell migration, design thinking, mechanical stimuli
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