Design and development of a novel biostretch apparatus for tissue engineering.

A uniaxial cyclic stretch apparatus is designed and developed for tissue engineering research. The biostretch apparatus employs noncontact electromagnetic force to uniaxially stretch a rectangular Gelfoam or RTV silicon scaffold. A reliable controller is implemented to control four stretch parameters independently: extent, frequency, pattern, and duration of the stretch. The noncontact driving force together with the specially designed mount allow researchers to use standard Petri dishes and commercially available CO(2) incubators to culture an engineered tissue patch under well-defined mechanical conditions. The culture process is greatly simplified over existing processes. Further, beyond traditional uniaxial stretch apparatuses, which provide stretch by fixing one side of the scaffolds and stretching the other side, the new apparatus can also apply uniaxial stretch from both ends simultaneously. Using the biostretch apparatus, the distributions of the strain on the Gelfoam and GE RTV 6166 silicon scaffolds are quantitatively analyzed.