Abstract

Origami-Enabled Tissue Engineering

Carol Livermore, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University

Replicating liver structure in engineered tissue is challenging because of liver’s dependence on the effective diffusion of nutrients and metabolic byproducts and because of the massive parallelism of its fine structure.  Origami-based microfluidics offers a new paradigm for addressing these challenges. Folding offers a low-cost, rapid means of creating larger scale fluidic structure to mimic vasculature; co-folding of porous and nonporous materials permits diffusion between hepatocytes and “engineered sinusoids”; and directed cell assembly offers control of cell organization at smaller length scales for the creation of hierarchical architectures. This talk will present the enabling tools of origami tissue engineering and their demonstration through the design, fabrication, and biological characterization of origami liver tissue units.