Disposable well-plate inserts and perfusion chambers for easy-to-use and generic microchannel creation in 3D tissue culture

ended

Functional 3D tissue models could replace animal experiments and significantly reduce the cost of over 100 million € that pharmaceutical companies spend on failed drug development every year. The main bottleneck in the in vitro creation of 3D tissues is the need for perfusable vascularization in tissues bigger than 1 mm. So far, no generally applicable product exists for that purpose. This hampers advances in drug development as well as in research. Design2Flow will develop products, which overcome this limitation and enable the individualized on-demand creation of perfusable and therefore larger and more complex tissues. This will fundamentally reform research in life sciences by offering easy-to-use, customizable, perfusable 3D cell culture products of interest to the pharmaceutical industry and research labs. To achieve this goal melt electrowriting will be utilized to fabricate sacrificial scaffolds, which resemble the native microvasculature. The fabricated scaffolds will be combined with insert clips as easy-to-use designs for multiwell plates, which will allow a passive perfusion of the construct to keep the tissue alive without the need for a special pump – a beginner friendly way to start advanced 3D cell culture with basic laboratory equipment, without the need for expensive devices or experienced personal. For customers working with perfusion pumps, the proposed solution will be adapted to perfusion chambers for an active and controllable perfusion of the tissue by flow reactors, mimicking the in vivo blood flow even more accurately. This will provide an advanced and customizable way to create tissues as accurate as possible for physiological cultivation in bioreactors.