A Review of Current Methods in Microfluidic Device Fabrication and Future Commercialization Prospects

Gale, Bruce K.; Jafek, Alexander; Lambert, Christopher J.; Goenner, Brady L.; Moghimifam, Hossein; Nze, Ugochukwu; Kamarapu, Suraj Kumar

doi:10.3390/inventions3030060

Cited by 331 publications

(310 citation statements)

References 96 publications

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“…Microfabrication is the process of miniaturizing patterns onto a solid substrate by fabricating structures of micrometer‐scale in size. A variety of microfabrication techniques have been established for fabricating microfluidic devices . In this section, we focus on the two main methods employed for microfabricating devices used for in vitro vasculatures today; the widely used PDMS soft lithography and the recently developed 3D bioprinting technique.…”

Section: Design Consideration: How Simple Is Complex Enough?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recreating Physiological Environments In Vitro: Design Rules for Microfluidic‐Based Vascularized Tissue Constructs

Tan

Leung

2020

Small

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Vascularization of engineered tissue constructs remains one of the greatest unmet challenges to mimicking the native tissue microenvironment in vitro. The main obstacle is recapitulating the complexity of the physiological environment while providing simplicity in operation and manipulation of the model. Microfluidic technology has emerged as a promising tool that enables perfusion of the tissue constructs through engineered vasculatures and precise control of the vascular microenvironment cues in vitro. The tunable microenvironment includes i) biochemical cues such as coculture, supporting matrix, and growth factors and ii) engineering aspects such as vasculature engineering methods, fluid flow, and shear stress. In this systematic review, the design considerations of the microfluidic‐based in vitro model are discussed, with an emphasis on microenvironment control to enhance the development of next‐generation vascularized engineered tissues.

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Section: Design Consideration: How Simple Is Complex Enough?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Recreating Physiological Environments In Vitro: Design Rules for Microfluidic‐Based Vascularized Tissue Constructs

Tan

Leung

2020

Small

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“…Moreover, the tailor-made architectural organization of OOCs enables to study the interactions between different biological compartments, such as cells and the extracellular matrix (ECM), tissue-tissue interfaces and parenchymal-vascular association [199,200]. One of the most important aspects of OOCs is that it is possible to combine different biomaterials, microfabrication techniques (extensively reviewed in [201,202]) and cell types for creating multi-compartment and multiphysiological systems that can model tissues pathophysiology. These systems can be developed for reflecting individual pathophysiological conditions by including blood samples, patient-derived primary adult stem cells or iPSCs and by adjusting physiochemical parameters of the flow according to personal health data [203] (Figure 1).…”

Section: Ex Vivo Stem Cell-based Systems: Organs-on-a-chipmentioning

confidence: 99%

Harnessing the Potential of Stem Cells for Disease Modeling: Progress and Promises

Argentati

Tortorella

Bazzucchi

et al. 2020

JPM

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Ex vivo cell/tissue-based models are an essential step in the workflow of pathophysiology studies, assay development, disease modeling, drug discovery, and development of personalized therapeutic strategies. For these purposes, both scientific and pharmaceutical research have adopted ex vivo stem cell models because of their better predictive power. As matter of a fact, the advancing in isolation and in vitro expansion protocols for culturing autologous human stem cells, and the standardization of methods for generating patient-derived induced pluripotent stem cells has made feasible to generate and investigate human cellular disease models with even greater speed and efficiency. Furthermore, the potential of stem cells on generating more complex systems, such as scaffold-cell models, organoids, or organ-on-a-chip, allowed to overcome the limitations of the two-dimensional culture systems as well as to better mimic tissues structures and functions. Finally, the advent of genome-editing/gene therapy technologies had a great impact on the generation of more proficient stem cell-disease models and on establishing an effective therapeutic treatment. In this review, we discuss important breakthroughs of stem cell-based models highlighting current directions, advantages, and limitations and point out the need to combine experimental biology with computational tools able to describe complex biological systems and deliver results or predictions in the context of personalized medicine.Since their establishment, cell cultures have been proven to be the first and most powerful tool for the in vitro investigation of cell biology, from basic research to more complex translational approaches [6]. Classical two-dimensional (2D)-cultures usually consist of a unique type of cells (primary or continuous cultures) that grow in tissue culture polystyrene as adherent monolayers or in floating suspension, both in culture media that provide essential nutrients and growth factors. 2D-strategies are widely used to obtain a large number of cells, thus allowing the in vitro study of molecular mechanisms and development of metabolic assays [7-9]. However, due to their inability to recreate the in vivo complexity of the biological environment, they are not suitable for accurate disease modeling. These limitations have been overcome by the development of three-dimensional (3D)-cell cultures systems [10]. The rationale design of 3D-cell cultures is to harvest cells in microstructures that resemble tissues or organs shape and organization, thus allowing better cell-to-cell/cell-environment contacts and signaling crosstalk [11][12][13][14][15], essential events for tissues correct development and functioning [14,15]. The 3D-cell culture strategy is articulated in many different methods and techniques that can be grouped in scaffold-based or non-scaffold based platforms, each with particular advantages and disadvantages that make them useful for different applications [10,[16][17][18][19]. 3D-cell culture strategies are supported by the in silico...

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“…µ-pervaporation takes advantage of the extremely well-defined poly(dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) geometries crafted by soft-lithography [10,11], as well as the ability of some solvents to pervaporate across the elastomer PDMS matrix [12]. Pervaporation induces a concentration mechanism of the solute, which was initially solubilized/dispersed in the solvent, thus leading to the formation of a solid that grows in a neat geometry [13].…”

Section: Thin and Structured Coatings Of Densely Packed Ceo 2 Nanoparmentioning

confidence: 99%

Thin Coatings of Cerium Oxide Nanoparticles with Anti-Reflective Properties

Romasanta

d’Alencon

Kirchner³

et al. 2019

Applied Sciences

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Cerium oxide, in addition to its catalytic properties, is also known for its optical properties such as ultraviolet (UV) radiation filtering and a relatively high refractive index (n > 2), which makes it an excellent candidate for multifunctional coatings. Here, we focus on the optical properties of thin deposits ( 2 µm) of densely packed CeO 2 nanoparticles, which we assemble using two evaporation-based techniques: convective self-assembly (CSA, a type of very slow blade-coating) to fabricate large-scale coatings of controllable thickness-from tens of nanometres to a few micrometers-and microfluidic pervaporation which permits us to add some micro-structure to the coatings. Spectroscopic ellipsometry yields the refractive index of the resulting nano-porous coatings, which behave as lossy dielectrics in the UV-visible regime and loss-less dielectrics in the visible to infra-red (IR) regime; in this regime, the fairly high refractive index (≈1.8) permits us to evidence thickness-tunable anti-reflection on highly refractive substrates, such as silicon, and concomitant enhanced transmissions which we checked in the mid-IR region.

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A Review of Current Methods in Microfluidic Device Fabrication and Future Commercialization Prospects

Cited by 331 publications

References 96 publications

Recreating Physiological Environments In Vitro: Design Rules for Microfluidic‐Based Vascularized Tissue Constructs

Recreating Physiological Environments In Vitro: Design Rules for Microfluidic‐Based Vascularized Tissue Constructs

Harnessing the Potential of Stem Cells for Disease Modeling: Progress and Promises

Thin Coatings of Cerium Oxide Nanoparticles with Anti-Reflective Properties

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