Speaker
Description
Organoids, 3D multicellular aggregates, provides excellent possibilities to recapitulate pato/physiological properties of human tissues or organs. Methodological obstacles lie in uniform formation, differentiation and long-term cultivation. Preparation and maintenance of organoids can be labor-intensive, medium exchange is usually discontinuous, and individual organoids are highly heterogenous in size, morphology, and cellular composition. Microfluidics help to overcome some of these disadvantages. Due to automation and proper design of chips, microfluidic systems are capable of continual medium flow in space and time, which allows to create better controlled microenvironments for cells.
In this work, we present designs of microfluidic system for uniform formation of organoids with low divergence of size and shape. System enables a parallel perfusion culture of large amount of cell spheroids as well as long term cultivation and cell differentiation. Upon in silico simulations, we optimized conditions for long-term cultures in chip. To improve their nutrient support, we also examined approaches for their vascularization.
This work was supported by the European Regional Development Fund - project INBIO (No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_026/0008451), project from Masaryk University (MUNI/IGA/1297/2021), Czech Science Foundation GA21-06524S and Ministry of Health of the Czech Republic (NU21-08-00561).
