Abstract

Beyond Tissue Printing: Liquid Like Solids Support 3D Cell Science and Engineering

Thomas Angelini, Associate Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University of Florida

Throughout the broad areas of tissue engineering, cellular therapeutics, and personalized medicine, there is an immediate need for research platforms with the facility and versatility of cell culture that rival or surpass the effectiveness of animal models, allowing biochemical, environmental, and mechanical parameters to be tuned precisely for each tissue, disease, patient and test condition. In this presentation I will describe a recently developed three-dimensional microenvironment for cell culture, as well as a 3D printing technique for creating micro-tissues within this 3D growth medium. The method leverages the fluid-solid jamming transition within liquid-like solids, which allows robotically controlled nozzles to create cellular structures, deposit molecules, and exchange fluids directly to suspended cell populations. This system enables the large scale, rapid generation of micro-tissues of reproducible size and geometry with access to nutrients or exogenously added bioactive molecules through unrestricted diffusion. This research is the focus of an ongoing collaboration between multiple laboratories from the college of engineering and the college of medicine at the University of Florida. The ultimate goal is to discover the chemical and physical environmental conditions necessary to create in vitro replicas of in vivo tissue groups for high-throughput drug screening, and implantation for tissue therapy or repair.