Development of a Microfluidic Device Embedding High-Conductivity Flexible Electrodes for Three-Dimensional Cell Culture Stimulations

Successful treatment of cardiovascular diseases has so far been limited by the lack of suitable autologous tissue to restore injured tissues. Currently, a novel encouraging frontier for such treatment is represented by tissue engineering [1]. Although traditional bioreactors for cardiac tissue engineering, based on a classical macro-scale approach, are widely used, research for identifying effective stimulation patterns has not lead to robust results yet. In this sense, the phenomena driving cell growth and differentiation become more addressable in reduced-scale systems, and microfluidics represents a valid alternative approach to overcome traditional bioreactors limitations. In order to favor the differentiation paths, recently developed microfluidic bioreactors tend to increase the control within cell culture chambers by coupling mechanical, electrical, thermical or optical effects. In particular, stem cell differentiation into cardiomyocytes seems to draw beneficial effects from electrical and mechanical stimulations [2]. This work introduces a simple method of embedding conductive and flexible material within microfluidic devices as a means to realize microscale bioreactors for cell electro-mechanical stimulation. Thanks to the proposed technology, high conductivity three-dimensional (3D) electrodes can be simply realized.