by Oju Jeon¹, T.J. Hinton², A.W Feinberg² and E. Alsberg¹. ¹Case Western Reserve University and ²Carnegie Mellon University.

Cell-laden microgels have been used as tissue building blocks to create three-dimensional (3D) tissues and organs. However, traditional assembly methods cannot be used to fabricate functional tissue constructs with biomechanical and structural complexity. In this study, we present directed assembly of cellladen dual-crosslinkable alginate microgels that comprised oxidized and methacrylated alginate (OMA). Cell-laden OMA microgels can be directly assembled into well-defined 3D shapes and structures under low-level ultraviolet light. Stem celleladen OMA microgels can be successfully cryopreserved for longterm storage and on-demand applications, and the recovered encapsulated cells maintained equivalent viability and functionality to the freshly processed stem cells. Finally, we have successfully demonstrated that cell-laden microgels can be assembled into complicated 3D tissue structures via freeform reversible embedding of suspended hydrogels (FRESH) 3D bioprinting. This highly innovative bottom-up strategy using FRESH 3D bioprinting of cell-laden OMA microgels, which are cryopreservable, provides a powerful and highly scalable tool for fabrication of customized and biomimetic 3D tissue constructs.

 

Reference
Jeon, O. et al. “Cryopreserved cell-laden alginate microgel bioink for 3D bioprinting
of living tissues” Materials Today Chemistry, Vol. 12, Jun 2019, pp. 61-70. DOI: 10.1016/j.mtchem.2018.11.009 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2468519418302325