Self-adhering hydrogels are promising materials to be employed as wound dressings, because they can be used for wound healing without the necessity of additional stitching. However, micro-organisms can easily adhere...
Lung‐on‐chips have showed great promise as a tool to recapitulate the respiratory system for investigation of lung diseases in the past decade. However, the commonly applied artificial elastic membrane (e.g., polydimethylsiloxane, PDMS) in the chip failed to mimic the alveolar basal membrane in the composition and mechanical properties. Here we replaced the PDMS film by a thin, biocompatible, soft, and stretchable membrane based on F127‐DA hydrogel that well approached to the composition and stiffness of extracellular matrix in human alveoli for construction of lung‐on‐a‐chip. This chip well reconstructed the mechanical microenvironments in alveoli so that the epithelial/endothelial functions were highly expressed with a well established alveolar‐capillary barrier. In opposite to the unexpectedly accelerated fibrotic process on the PDMS‐based lung‐on‐a‐chip, HPAEpiCs on hydrogel‐based chip only presented fibrosis under nonphysiologically high strain, well reflecting the features of pulmonary fibrosis in vivo. This physiologically relevant lung‐on‐a‐chip would be an ideal model in investigation of lung diseases and for development of antifibrosis drugs.
Hydrogel-based microfluidics offer an in vivo-relevant
micro-environments for construction of organs-on-chips. However, the
fabrication of heterogeneous microchannels using hydrogels is
challenging and fails to mimic the complex structures of organs in vivo.
Here we present a new methodology called “layer-by-layer adhesion” for
the construction of complex microfluidic chips. A hydrosoluble and
photo-crosslinkable adhesive, chitosan methacryloyl (CS-MA), was used to
stitch various hydrogels together layer-by-layer to form perfusable
microchannels. Our results show that CS-MA can bond different types of
hydrogels with adhesion energy ranging from 1.2-140 N/m. Using the
layer-by-layer adhesion approach, we constructed heterogeneous
hydrogel-based microchannels with various morphologies of snail, spiral,
vascular-like, and bilayer. Based on this methodology, liver-on-a-chip
was established by entrapping hepatic cells inside a biocompatible
Gel-MA layer and covering it with the perfusable microchannels in tough
F127-DA layer. The “layer-by-layer adhesion” provides a facile and
cytocompatible approach for engineering user-defined hydrogel-based
chips potentially for organs-on-chips.
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