Engineering a Blood Vessel Network Module for Body-on-a-Chip Applications

The blood circulatory system links all organs from one to another to support and maintain each organ's functions consistently. Therefore, blood vessels have been considered as a vital unit. Engineering perfusable functional blood vessels in vitro has been challenging due to difficulties in designing the connection between rigid macroscale tubes and fragile microscale ones. Here, we propose a generalizable method to engineer a "long" perfusable blood vessel network. To form millimeter-scale vessels, fibroblasts were co-cultured with human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) in close proximity. In contrast to previous works, in which all cells were permanently placed within the device, we developed a novel method to culture paracrine factor secreting fibroblasts on an O-ring-shaped guide that can be transferred in and out. This approach affords flexibility in co-culture, where the ef…