Robotic cell transport for tissue engineering

As an emerging technique, tissue engineering is promising in building artificial tissues, which can serve as pathological or pharmacological models in various fields, including regenerative medicine and drug discovery. Through fabricating cellular building blocks with special patterns and assembling them into 3D constructs, engineered tissue models have more intricate microstructural feature and more complete biofunctions. In this regard, cell transport involving ordering, screening, isolating, aggregating, and assembling has become a remarkable manipulation method participating in multiple processes of tissue engineering. With the assistance of the micro- and nanorobotic techniques, cell transport has achieved high flexibility and accuracy during the manipulation of cells or cellular micromodules, which facilitates the reproduction of living tissue becoming more efficient and adaptable. In this chapter, we introduce the recent work on the application of robotic cell transport techniques in engineering artificial tissues from two aspects: fabrication, and assembly of cellular modules, which are significant issues for tissue engineering.