An active microscaffold for applications in tissue engineering

Assembling engineered tissues at the mesoscale into an engineered organ has specially attracted our attention since engineered organ usually has a very complex structure and cannot be fabricated simply by using a fixed scaffold. The fabrication of these composite tissues is, however, difficult since many different scaffolds are required. The flexible microsaffold, called “changeable cell culture (C³) mold”, is therefore proposed to simplify this task. C³ mold consists of 5×5 PDMS microactuator array with a diameter of 700 μm and spacing of 800 μm. The fabrication of cutout-shaped gel sheet is successfully carried out where mineral oil is used as the working fluid. This experiment indeed demonstrates the possibility of using C³ mold in future tissue fabrication.