Design and fabrication of changeable cell culture mold

Although the fabrication of engineered organs as replacements for damaged organs has been widely studied over the past decade, practical fabrication is very difficult because the engineered organ usually has a very complex structure and cannot be fabricated simply by using a fixed scaffold. Special attention has therefore been paid to methods of making engineered organs by assembling composite parts. Since structures of these individual parts are very different, fabrication using fixed scaffolds requires a lot of effort and time. The concept of a changeable scaffold offered by "changeable cell culture (C³) mold" is proposed in this paper as a means to simplify the fabrication of these parts. Using a thin PDMS membrane as an actuator layer enables various scaffold structures to be formed and altered, in turn enabling the fabrication of many different tissue structures. C³ mold consists of a 3×3 microactuator array with a diameter of 500 μm and spacing of 650 μm. Plant oil is used as the working fluid enabling deformation of the actuator layer. Various micropatterned gel sheets are fabricated, in order to demonstrate the possibility of using C³ molds in future tissue fabrication.