Abstract
Living cells in human body exhibit their function in microstructured three dimensional (3D) environments composed of soluble factors, extracellular matrix (ECM), and neighboring cells. Fabricating biological 3D in vitro models of tissue and organ is a critical step for developing new strategies for cell based assay in drug discovery. To date, a number of research groups have developed micropatterning of hydrogels using photocurable and photodegradable hydrogels. This chapter reviews recent development on the techniques for microscale 3D fabrication of biomaterials by means of photolithography. Also, this chapter introduces an activated-ester-type photocleavable crosslinker, which we recently synthesized to generate photodegradable hydrogels using biocompatible materials such as polyethylene glycol and gelatin. This new type of crosslinker enabled convenient preparation of photodegradable hydrogel by two component mixing reaction. The hydrogels were degraded by micropatterned light irradiation, local light irradiation, and two-photon excitation. This simple and convenient approach to prepare and fabricate photodegradable hydrogels is creating new opportunity for novel cell manipulation and 3D tissue engineering techniques.
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