Microbioreactors for Cartilage Tissue Engineering.

In tissue engineering research, cell-based assays are widely utilized to fundamentally explore cellular responses to extracellular conditions. Nevertheless, the simplified cell culture models available at present have several inherent shortcomings and limitations. To tackle the issues, a wide variety of microbioreactors for cell culture have been actively proposed, especially during the past decade. Among these, micro-scale cell culture devices based on microfluidic biochip technology have particularly attracted considerable attention. In this chapter, we not only discuss the advantageous features of using micro-scale cell culture devices for cell-based assays, but also describe their fabrication, experimental setup, and application.