High-Throughput Fabrication and Modular Assembly of 3D Heterogeneous Microscale Tissues.

ABSTRACT

3D hydrogel microstructures that encapsulate cells have been used in broad applications in microscale tissue engineering, personalized drug screening, and regenerative medicine. Recent technological advances in microstructure assembly, such as bioprinting, magnetic assembly, microfluidics, and acoustics, have enabled the construction of designed 3D tissue structures with spatially organized cells in vitro. However, a bottleneck exists that still hampers the application of microtissue structures, due to a lack of techniques that combined high-throughput fabrication and flexible assembly. Here, a versatile method for fabricating customized microstructures and reorganizing building blocks composed of functional components into a combined single geometric shape is demonstrated. The arbitrary microstructures are dynamically synthesized in a microfluidic device and then transferred to an optically induced electrokinetics chip for manipulation and assembly. Moreover, building blocks containing different cells can be arranged into a desired geometry with specific shape and size, which can be used for microscale tissue engineering.