Abstract

Fabrication of Bilayer Cellular Systems for Organ-on-a-chip Applications Enabled by the Micromesh Culture Technique

Kennedy Okeyo, Senior Lecturer, Institute for Frontier Life and Medical Sciences, Kyoto University

Organ-on-chips are promising for their potential application to drug screening, disease modeling and basic biological studies. However, challenges still persist with regard to fabricating organ-on-chip platforms which can faithfully recapitulate the in vivo architecture and functionality. A major limitation lies in the use of semipermeable or porous artificial materials such as PDMS (polydimethylsiloxane) to interface the different cell layers, such as epithelial-endothelial bilayer commonly used in organ-on-chip models. Such interfacing materials are by far too thick (> 5 micron in thickness) and rigid compared with the in vivo basement membrane (< 0.2 micron in thickness), and they limit cross-layer cell-cell interaction leading to poor mimicry of in vivo functionality. This talk will highlight our micromesh culture technique and demonstrate its application toward the realization of bilayer cellular systems interfaced with a fabricated hydrogel basement membrane mimic. The thickness of the basement membrane mimic can be tuned to less than 1 micron, allowing us to fabricate bilayer cellular systems with better mimicry of the in vivo architecture and functionality for possible application to drug assay, disease modeling and other organ-on-chip studies.