A Novel Micro-Tissue Reactor for Maintaining Hepatocytes in Vitro

We apply the biomimetic engineering concept to design a microfluidic device which mimics the flow field of the real functional liver tissue. HepG2/C3A in microreactor not only possessed the ultrastructure of tight junctions and apical microvilli, but also arranged as hepatic cord-like morphology under designed fluids field. In addition, albumin synthesis and urea production were also enhanced in microreactors compared to those in conventional Petri dish cultures. The microfluid cell culture array could potentially be applied in a wide range such as high throughput cell-based screening, drug screening, personal cell therapy and quantitative cell biology.