Development of a micro stamping equipment for spheroid scaffold

Abstract

We developed a scaffold to make spheroids and organoids easily by forming an extracellular matrix patterns on a substrate coated with fluororesin. The size of the pattern made with a microstamp must be accurately controlled in advance, to control size of the spheroids by this method. The shape of patterns is varied by the parallelism of the stamp with the substrate and the stamping load. Therefore, to improve the reproducibility of patterning, we made a device capable of controlling the parallelism and the load of the stamp. The parallel alignment of the substrate and the stamp was made possible by irradiating the bottom surface of the microstamp with light and reading the maximum value of the reflected light with a fiber sensor. The load was calculated from the deflection detected by the linear sensor. We report the improvement in reproducibility of extracellular matrix pattern size by using this device.