Development of an inkjet head for cell ejection using MEMS manufacturing technology

Abstract

There is great demand for technology to deposit arbitrary number of cells with high resolution in the fields such as regenerative medicine and drug discovery. We have previously presented an inkjet head specialized for on-demand ejection of live cell suspension. Droplets are formed by membrane vibration, which is generated by pulse actuation of a piezoelectric vibrator. However, the previous reported head is made by assembling some parts, so integration of the nozzles and downsizing are hard because of depending on the size of the parts. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a new inkjet head downsized to less than one tenth of the previous head size using MEMS manufacturing technology. It is expected to realize multi-nozzle head with highly integrated nozzles and improve the productivity for ejection cells. In this study, we report the results of ejection and patterning cells using the new head.