Local melting of hydrogel for microchannels fabrication in cell structures

In this paper, we propose a new method to construct microchannels inside cell structures. A local melting of cell embedded hydrogel is employed to make microchannels inside cell structures. The fabricated microchannels can be used as vascular-like networks to supply nutrition and oxygen to cells. Electrodes were fabricated using photolithography technique on a glass substrate. The hydrogel to embed cells were prepared by mixing gelatin and agar in culture media. A microchannel was experimentally fabricated using the fabricated electrodes to locally melt the hydrogel on the electrodes. The fabricated channel width and height by local heating was changed proportionally by the heating time when the applied voltage to the electrodes was constant. The results indicate that the proposed method can be used to making vascular-like networks inside cell structures to construct in vitro 3D cell systems.