Predictable fabrication of pre-made alginate hydrogel microtubes for stem cell aggregation using needle-in-needle devices

Abstract

Alginate hydrogels in microtubular structures have great potential to advance three-dimensional (3D) culture, organoid formation, tissue engineering, and cell therapy. To address the need of fabricating consistent, stable hydrogel microtubes for efficient large organoid generation in a simple and quick manner, we have designed needle-in-needle devices to fabricate alginate hydrogel microtubes without any dead volume of the cell-alginate mixture and demonstrated the feasibility of injecting and culturing embryoid bodies in these pre-made hydrogel microtubes. We further used a reverse engineering approach to find out the optimal flow rates and alginate concentration for fabricating pre-made hydrogel microtubes with desired diameter using particular sets of needle-in-needle devices. We established the relationship of the alginate flow rate with diameter and wall thickness of the microtube using mathematic modeling. It offers a way to determine the flow rate for making microtubes with the desired dimension. Additionally, we evaluated the effect of CaCl₂concentration on the diameter as well as stem cell viability. At last, we demonstrated the capacity of fabricating hydrogel microtubes of varying diameters using three sets of needle-in-needle devices and evaluated stem cell growth in these hydrogel microtubes. It provides a new avenue to accessible, repeatable, scalable, and easy to use pre-made 'off-the-shelf' hydrogel microtubes for 3D cell culture including, but not limiting to stem cells.

Keywords: 3D Culture; alginate; biofabrication; hydrogel; microtube; modeling; stem cell.