Robotics Engineering Program, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Massachusetts.
Tissue Eng Part A. 2019 Sep;25(17-18):1251-1260. doi: 10.1089/ten.TEA.2018.0288. Epub 2019 Aug 9.
Self-assembled tissues have potential to serve both as implantable grafts and as tools for disease modeling and drug screening. For these applications, tissue production must ultimately be scaled-up and automated. Limited technologies exist for precisely manipulating self-assembled tissues, which are fragile early in culture. Here, we presented a method for automatically stacking self-assembled smooth muscle cell rings onto mandrels, using a custom-designed well plate and robotic punch system. Rings then fuse into tissue-engineered blood vessels (TEBVs). This is a critical step toward automating TEBV production that may be applied to other tubular tissues as well.
自组装组织具有作为可植入移植物以及用于疾病建模和药物筛选工具的潜力。对于这些应用，组织生产最终必须规模化和自动化。目前用于精确操作自组装组织的技术有限，因为这些组织在培养早期非常脆弱。在这里，我们使用定制设计的孔板和机器人打孔系统，提出了一种将自组装平滑肌细胞环自动堆叠到心轴上的方法。然后，环融合成组织工程血管（TEBV）。这是朝着自动化 TEBV 生产迈出的关键一步，也可应用于其他管状组织。
