Biomaterials Meet Microfluidics: From Synthesis Technologies to Biological Applications

Abstract

Microfluidics is characterized by laminar flow at micro-scale dimension, high surface to volume ratio, and markedly improved heat/mass transfer. In addition, together with advantages of large-scale integration and flexible manipulation, microfluidic technology has been rapidly developed as one of the most important platforms in the field of functional biomaterial synthesis. Compared to biomaterials assisted by conventional strategies, functional biomaterials synthesized by microfluidics are with superior properties and performances, due to their controllable morphology and composition, which have shown great advantages and potential in the field of biomedicine, biosensing, and tissue engineering. Take the significance of microfluidic engineered biomaterials into consideration; this review highlights the microfluidic synthesis technologies and biomedical applications of materials. We divide microfluidic based biomaterials into four kinds. According to the material dimensionality, it includes: 0D (particulate materials), 1D (fibrous materials), 2D (sheet materials), and 3D (construct forms of materials). In particular, micro/nano-particles and micro/nano-fibers are introduced respectively. This classification standard could include all of the microfluidic biomaterials, and we envision introducing a comprehensive and overall evaluation and presentation of microfluidic based biomaterials and their applications.

The Construction and Application of Three‐Dimensional Biomaterials

“…Microfluidic spinning is a kind of technique where two fluids, divided as the core phase and the sheath phase, are pumped into micro‐channels. During the process, flows in microfluidic channels are kept laminar without any mixing with each other because of their low Reynolds numbers (Re) . Only limited diffusion exists at their interface.…”

Bioprinting of 3D tissues/organs combined with microfluidics

“…The use of microuidic technology to design and prepare functional 3D cell-laden constructs has recently become a popular topic. According to the denition of 3D materials in our published review, 28 which was specic to 3D cell-laden constructs produced via microuidics, this term refers to materials with sizes in each dimension of almost the same order of magnitude that exhibit a "construct" appearance, and the sizes in at least two dimensions are on the millimeter scale. Microuidic syntheses of 3D cell-laden constructs usually adopt a hydrogel assembly strategy, including the formation of hydrogel constructs with tunable geometries via microchannel constrictions, 29 bottom-up engineering of hydrogel building blocks, 30 and the assembly of 3D constructs from microuidic spun microbres (e.g., via reeling, weaving, or direct writing), [31][32][33] as shown in Fig.…”

Large-Scale Flow in Micro Electrokinetic Turbulent Mixer

“…Microfluidics has many advantages to manipulate fluid flows and target samples in a small size and has broad applications in biomedicine, organic synthesis, electrical engineering, and chemical engineering etc. [ 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 ] For instance, various micro sensors [ 6 ], implantable chips [ 7 ], DNA sequencing chips [ 8 ], and micromixers [ 9 ] etc. have been developed.…”