Abstract
Bottom-up engineering of tissue constructs is being rapidly developed and broadly applied in biomanufacturing. As one type of building block, cell-laden microfibers are promising for reconstruction of oriented structures and functions of linear tissues, such as skeletal muscles, myocardia, and spinal cord tissues. Herein, we propose wet-spinning method with agitating collection, wherein alginate-based material is extruded into an agitated CaCl2 bath with a magnetic rotor acting as the microfiber collector. By applying this method, we achieve rapid fabrication and oriented collection of hydrogel microfibers with diameters ranging from 100 to 400 μm. In addition, we encapsulate myoblasts in the hydrogel to form cell-laden microfibers, which show a high viability (more than 94%) during in vitro culture. Moreover, the method allows to fabricate of cell-laden core–sheath microfibers and hollow microfibers. We also fabricate 3D constructs using various methods of microfiber assembly like weaving and braiding. The assembling results suggest that the proposed method is a promising technology for bottom-up engineering of aligned biomimetic tissue constructs.
Highlights
The modular approach of bottom-up engineering for tissue constructs has been widely developed in recent years (Nichol and Khademhosseini, 2009; Nie and Takeuchi, 2018)
We propose the rapid fabrication of various cell-laden microfibers (CLMs) for constructing aligned biomimetic tissue
From the proposed WSAC process, we systematically evaluate the fabrication of hydrogel microfibers considering the microfiber diameter and mechanical properties
Summary
The modular approach of bottom-up engineering for tissue constructs has been widely developed in recent years (Nichol and Khademhosseini, 2009; Nie and Takeuchi, 2018). To resemble the functional or structural tissue units of the native tissues or organs, such as muscle fibers, blood vessels, and renal corpuscles, microtissues have been designed, produced, and assembled into the target 3D constructs (Elbert, 2011). The bottom-up approach allows to generate bioengineered functional tissues with tunable microarchitectures, cell distributions, and precisely engineered properties (Gauvin and Khademhosseini, 2011). Various building blocks such as cell sheets (Matsuda et al, 2007), cell spheroids (Lee et al, 2016), and cell-laden hydrogel blocks (Jiang et al, 2016) have been prepared and assembled into 3D structures using bottom-up engineering.
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