Personalized Single‐Cell Encapsulation Using E‐Jet 3D Printing with AC‐Pulsed Modulation

Abstract

With the growing therapeutic importance of cell microcarriers, there has been a rise in the need to develop technologies that facilitate efficient microencapsulation of cells, currently limited by a lack of straightforward and low‐cost strategies for single‐cell isolation and printing. Thus, the aim of this study is to develop a gentle and cell‐compatible electro‐hydrodynamic jet 3D printing technique to facilitate the efficient microencapsulation of cells in hydrogel microspheres, and investigate the effects of parameters (flow rate, voltage frequency, nozzle diameter, working distance, and substrate velocity) on the printing process. Stable microspheres are obtained by regulating these parameters to balance various forces, with control of their diameters in the range of 100–600 µm. The study demonstrates that under optimized conditions, the technique is able to successfully encapsulate cells within hydrogel microspheres with high viability over a wide range of diameters. This 3D printing technique expands the potential utility of microspheres into additional biological applications, such as cancer biology and drug screening. It can also be used as an effective platform for the production of tumor spheroids, generating multicellular spheroid models in vitro or for injectable cell delivery.

3D printed intelligent scaffold prevents recurrence and distal metastasis of breast cancer

“…The drug-loaded PLGA-DOX-5FU (PD5) scaffolds were fabricated using our electro-hydrodynamic jet (E-jet) 3D printing system 42 , 43 and characterized by micro-CT and scanning electron microscopy (SEM; Figure S1 , Figure S2 ). To ensure pH responsiveness, the PD5 scaffolds were sandwiched between a GC gel to fabricate the intelligent scaffold (IS) (Figure 1 ), which were shown to be completely wrapped by the gel (Figure 2 A, Figure S3 , and Figure S4 ).…”

Unveiling the Potential of Single‐Cell Encapsulation in Biomedical Applications: Current Advances and Future Perspectives

“…Besides droplets, microfluidics can also generate microgels by adding a hydrogel precursor to the cell suspension. Although the majority use microfluidics as the main technique to form microgels, there are other methodologies, such as manual drop-wise encapsulation, [74][75][76] acoustic systems, [77,78] jet printing, [79] hydroelectric atomization, [36] among others (Figure 3). This approach is usually preferred over the previous method, due to microgel robustness and durability, being more suitable for disease modeling or tissue engineering purposes.…”

High-resolution electrohydrodynamic bioprinting: a new biofabrication strategy for biomimetic micro/nanoscale architectures and living tissue constructs

“…However, the diameter of the droplets was more than 300 µm under different printing parameters. Wang et al utilized AC-pulse-modulated voltage to periodically eject hydrogel droplets which were deposited precisely in predesigned patterns on the substrate (figures 10(e) and (f)) [145]. They studied the effect of five different nozzle-to-collector distances (2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 mm) on EHD printing process and found that the diameter of droplets can be stably controlled ranging from 150 µm to 600 µm with high cell viabilities.…”