| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立中興大學 === 機械工程學系所 === 94 === One of the continuing, persistent challenges with tissue engineering is the lack of intrinsic blood vessels to transport nutrient and metabolite, thus making it difficult for any implanted cells to obtain sufficient oxygen and nutrients to survive, and/or function properly. It is thus desired to provide the artificial tissues with artificial microvessels. For the published literatures regarding the microvessel scaffold, the soft lithography was the main fabrication technique, resulting microchannels with rectangular cross-section. In general, the real microvessels under no external pressure have circular cross-section. Although the velocity profiles inside a rectangular and a circular microchannel such as the microvessel are very similar, there are always dead volumes around the corners of a rectangular microchannel. The dead volume problem likely leads to inefficient circulations of nutrient and oxygen during the cell seeding. It is thus desired to put efforts on developing techniques in fabricating microvessel scaffolds with circular microchannels.
In this research, a new process that integrates the photoresist melting and soft lithography techniques to fabricate microvessel scaffolds with circular microchannels is proposed. The commercial software FEMLAB is adopted to optimize the structure of the microvessel scaffold. The photolithographic technique is applied to fabricate the photoresist JSR based microstructure that is then melted to the final replica mold with its structure having convex semicircle cross-section. The replica mold is hence used to replicate PDMS to the top and bottom plate of a microvessel scaffold. These two half plates are bonded after having surface treatment by inductive coupled plasma (ICP) to form the complete scaffold with circular microchannels. Finally, the bovine endothelial cells (BEC) are cultured into the scaffold. Encouraging results by semi-dynamic seeding are observed. Cells can survive in the scaffold up to four weeks.
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