Droplet microfluidics: from soft-granular materials to tissue engineering.
By: Jan Guzowski
From: Instytut Chemii Fizycznej, Polskiej Akademii Nauk , Warszawa, Poland
At: zoom (https://videoconf-colibri.zoom.us/j/82030502411?pwd=aW1VbH
[2021-01-14]
Microfluidic fabrication of cell-laden compartmentalized mesotructures such as microdroplet- or microhydrogel aggregates has been recently gaining increasing from the point of view of tissue engineering, in particular as a tool in engineering of micro-tissues and organoids built of multiple cell types arranged in a specific, predesigned spatial pattern. I will present the idea of using capillary self-assembly of droplets or hydrogel microbeads inside microchannels as a way of controlled and reproducible generation of such mesostructures including - besides clusters and aggregates - also chains, 'multi-chains', as well as exotic quasi-1D linear structures. I will discuss possible applications of such structures in generation of (i) micro-organs such as artificial pancreatic islets, or (ii) vascularized microtissues and microtumors. I will also show how the quasi-1D linear structures can be printed at a substrate—such that the printed pattern encodes the information about the combination of biomaterials (i.e., cells, hydrogels, drugs, etc.) encapsulated inside each of the droplets—for future applications in high-throughput drug screening. Finally, I will also sketch our recent idea of microfluidic-assisted assembly of endothelial-cell coated microbeads into regularly-spaced 2D arrays embedded in an external hydrogel matrix. Such structures may serve as arrays of angiogenic 'seeds' for systematic tracking of the development of a complex vascular network. I will discuss the perspectives of using such systems in disease modeling, drug testing and regenerative medicine.
