Hierarchically Inverse Opal Porous Scaffolds from Droplet Microfluidics for Biomimetic 3D Cell Co-Culture

• 作者: Changmin Shao Yuxiao Liu Junjie Chi Fangfu Ye Yuanjin Zhao
• 来源期刊: 工程（英文）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（12）
• 所属期刊栏目: Medical Engineering—Article
• 页码范围: 1778-1785
• 页数: 8页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

With the advantages of better mimicking the specificity of natural tissues,three-dimensional(3D)cell culture plays a major role in drug development,toxicity testing,and tissue engineering.However,exist-ing scaffolds or microcarriers for 3D cell culture are often limited in size and show suboptimal perfor-mance in simulating the vascular complexes of living organisms.Therefore,we present a novel hierarchically inverse opal porous scaffold made via a simple microfluidic approach for promoting 3D cell co-culture techniques.The designed scaffold is constructed using a combined concept involving an emul-sion droplet template and inert polymer polymerization.This work demonstrates that the resultant scaf-folds ensure a sufficient supply of nutrients during cell culture,so as to achieve large-volume cell culture.In addition,by serially planting different cells in the scaffold,a 3D co-culture system of endothelial-cell-encapsulated hepatocytes can be developed for constructing certain functional tissues.It is also demon-strated that the use of the proposed scaffold for a co-culture system helps hepatocytes to maintain speci-fic in vivo functions.These hierarchically inverse opal scaffolds lay the foundation for 3D cell culture and even the construction of biomimetic tissues.