Bottom-up biofabrication using microfluidic techniques

Abstract

Nature builds living organisms in a bottom-up fashion, starting from the expression of genetic information on a cellular level, to the proliferation, differentiation, and self-assembly of cells into tissues/organs during embryo development and wound-healing processes. To mimic this bottom-up approach, it is essential to handle and manipulate small-scale biomaterials using specific technologies, such as microfluidic techniques. Microfluidics provides the tool-sets that deal with the behavior, precise control and manipulation of small amounts of fluids. Since the handling performed in aqueous environment guarantees the well-preserved bioactivities of biomaterials, microfluidic techniques show unique and critical advantages for biofabrication purposes. In this review, we report the recent progress on the bottom-up biofabrication using microfluidic techniques, such as the fabrication of microtissues, bioprinting of cell-laden tissue scaffolds, and organ-on-a-chip. As future perspectives, the deeper convergence of bottom-up approaches with top-down approaches as well as microfluidic-enabled vascularization of thick tissues is anticipated to have enormous impacts on the field of biofabrication.

Assembling Living Building Blocks to Engineer Complex Tissues

“…Past reviews have described a general overview of modular assembly for bottom-up tissue engineering, [8][9][10][11] while others have provided a more focused view of specific building blocks [12,13] or assembly techniques. [14][15][16] However, there have been a number of recent advances in biofabrication that have significantly enriched the palette of available modules and assembly techniques. [17,18] In this Progress Report, we provide a thorough account of the recent progress and trends in this area, with a focus on living building blocks, i.e.…”

“…[53] This approach enables the use of more advanced processing methods; in particular, microfluidics has emerged as a powerful tool for the controlled and programmed fabrication of living building blocks. [14,16] Looking forward, there is also the opportunity to integrate microfluidics with other technologies, such as acoustics (acoustofluidics [257] ), which can enable new methods of living building block fabrication.…”

Emulating Human Tissues and Organs: A Bioprinting Perspective Toward Personalized Medicine

“… 4 Even though it cannot be considered a bioprinting or bioassembly technology on its own, microfluidics play a central role in the field of biofabrication by enabling the handling of materials, cells, and fluids on a small scale and with high precision. 5 This and other areas have witnessed substantial development over the past decade, and several reviews have been published covering the different aspects related to biofabrication. 6 − 8 Bioprinting falls under the general umbrella of biofabrication and can be defined as a group of computer-controlled techniques operating in a layer-by-layer fashion that when combined with computer aided design (CAD), or medical imaging, allow the production of patient-specific models/implants with precise 3D spatial positioning of multiple living and nonliving materials.…”

Rapid Fabrication of Cell-Laden Microfibers for Construction of Aligned Biomimetic Tissue

“…The modular approach of bottom-up engineering for tissue constructs has been widely developed in recent years (Nichol and Khademhosseini, 2009;Nie and Takeuchi, 2018). To resemble the functional or structural tissue units of the native tissues or organs, such as muscle fibers, blood vessels, and renal corpuscles, microtissues have been designed, produced, and assembled into the target 3D constructs (Elbert, 2011).…”