Gel-fibers reeling system (Gel-FRS) with embedding biological cells for small diameter cellular vessels

Abstract

We proposed gel-fibers reeling system (Gel-FRS) with embedding biological cells for small diameter cellular vessels. To realize artificial 3D tissue, capillary blood vessels are important to be built in it as one of the typical small diameter cellular vessels. As previous works, a method to fabricate patient-specific vascular scaffolds was proposed using a biodegradable polymer, PLCL (poly(L-lactide-co-ε-caprolactone)). In this paper, we demonstrated a way for seeding smooth muscle cells and fibroblast cells outside the PLCL scaffold using the gel-fibers reeling system. At first, the mechanical stiffness of gel fibers was determined to achieve fiber reeling. The tensile stress of gel fibers was also evaluated without breaking down. The reeling speed of gel fiber was determined for seeding cells uniformly on a scaffold. The multiple hydrogel fibers embedding biological cells were reeled onto tubular PLCL scaffold, and then the alginate gel were melted by an alginate lyase. A uniform cell seeding onto upper and under surfaces of PLCL scaffold was achieved by rotating scaffold at 180 degrees every one hour. As a result, we achieved seeding cells onto scaffold and the cells viability was more than 90%. The proposed gel-fibers reeling system is important to be applicable in wide areas such as tissue engineering and bio simulators.