Page 7 - manuscript_ijb05583
P. 7

from a microfluidic channel   12–15 . While such devices are useful for the precise ejection of

               liquids, for example for on-demand droplet printing, ejecting particles within such droplets
               may pose additional challenges. For example, particles are not always positioned in the center

               of  the  droplet,  making  repeatable  screening  problematic.  Further,  sheath  air  used  to  form
               droplets may move either of the two phases faster, causing uneven ejection.


               In this report, we demonstrate an approach to dispense buckyball-shaped microscaffolds within

               a  sheath  liquid  one-by-one  and  with  high  precision  into  microtiter  plates  using  a  newly
               developed  microfluidic  sorting  platform  (Figure  1).  For  performance  evaluation  of  the  air

               pressure-based dispensing method, intactness of the microscaffold constructs was verified by
               in-flow fluorescent intensity analysis upstream of the ejector region and was used as a selection

               criterion  quality  control  measure.  Subsequently,  automated  deposition  of  human  adipose-
               derived stem cells (hASCs) onto the microscaffolds allowed the formation of S-SPHs already

               within 24 hours of culture. We introduce for the first time an automated and reproducible

               workflow for mass production of building blocks for the converging strategy in TE for a variety
               of cell-culture collection vessels including 96-, 384- and even 1536-well plates.

































               Figure  1:  Microfluidic  platform  schematic  for  high-throughput,  automated  fabrication  of
               scaffolded spheroids (S-SPH). Validated scaffolds, deposited and seeded with primary stem

               cells in wells, mature into S-SPH building blocks for TE applications.









                                                            6
   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10   11   12