A Cylindrical Molding Method for the Biofabrication of Plane-Shaped Skeletal Muscle Tissue

Micromachines

Kenta Fukushima¹  Ai Shima²  Yuya Morimoto²  Shoji Takeuchi²  Minghao Nie² 

[1] Department of Mechano-Informatics, Faculty of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan;Department of Mechano-Informatics, Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan;

关键词: biofabrication;    tissue engineering;    skeletal muscle;    microtissue assembly;   

DOI  :  10.3390/mi12111411

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

Muscle tissues can be fabricated in vitro by culturing myoblast-populated hydrogels. To counter the shrinkage of the myoblast-populated hydrogels during culture, a pair of anchors are generally utilized to fix the two ends of the hydrogel. Here, we propose an alternative method to counter the shrinkage of the hydrogel and fabricate plane-shaped skeletal muscle tissues. The method forms myoblast-populated hydrogel in a cylindrical cavity with a central pillar, which can prevent tissue shrinkage along the circumferential direction. By eliminating the usages of the anchor pairs, our proposed method can produce plane-shaped skeletal muscle tissues with uniform width and thickness. In experiments, we demonstrate the fabrication of plane-shaped (length: ca. 10 mm, width: 5~15 mm) skeletal muscle tissue with submillimeter thickness. The tissues have uniform shapes and are populated with differentiated muscle cells stained positive for myogenic differentiation markers (i.e., myosin heavy chains). In addition, we show the assembly of subcentimeter-order tissue blocks by stacking the plane-shaped skeletal muscle tissues. The proposed method can be further optimized and scaled up to produce cultured animal products such as cultured meat.

【 授权许可】

Unknown