Development of Microvascular Devices and Their Application to Bioanalytical Chemistry

Abstract

Recently, many three-dimensional tissue models (Organ-on-a-chip devices) that mimic the human cellular microenvironment have been developed. Because blood vessels are exposed to blood flow, their in-vivo functions cannot be evaluated with the conventional static mono-culture of vascular endothelial cells. Therefore, the development of microvascular models is particularly important. The microvascular model has a structure that mimics tissue composed of multiple types of cells, as opposed to a single type of cells cultured under static planar conditions, and can be used for bioassays with mechanical stimulation. Here, I introduce the author's past study in the development of bioassay devices for vascular and lymphatic permeability and absorption, pulmonary hypertension microdevices, and blood cell differentiation microdevices, and their applications to bioanalytical chemistry.