Here, we present a protocol that describes the fabrication of stretchable, dual channel, organ chip microfluidic cell culture devices for recapitulating organ-level functionality in vitro.
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Method Article
Scalable Fabrication of Stretchable, Dual Channel, Microfluidic Organ Chips
* These authors contributed equally
In This Article
Erratum Notice
Important: There has been an erratum issued for this article. View Erratum Notice
Summary
Abstract
A significant number of lead compounds fail in the pharmaceutical pipeline because animal studies often fail to predict clinical responses in human patients. Human Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) microfluidic cell culture devices, which provide an experimental in vitro platform to assess efficacy, toxicity, and pharmacokinetic (PK) profiles in humans, may be better predictors of therapeutic efficacy and safety in the clinic compared to animal studies. These devices may be used to model the function of virtually any organ type and can be fluidically linked through common endothelium-lined microchannels to perform in vitro studies on human organ-level and whole body-level physiology without having to conduct experiments on people. These Organ Chips consist of two perfused microfluidic channels separated by a permeable elastomeric membrane with organ-specific parenchymal cells on one side and microvascular endothelium on the other, which can be cyclically stretched to provide organ-specific mechanical cues (e.g., breathing motions in lung). This protocol details the fabrication of flexible, dual channel, Organ Chips through casting of parts using 3D printed molds, enabling combination of multiple casting and post-processing steps. Porous poly (dimethyl siloxane) (PDMS) membranes are cast with micrometer sized through-holes using silicon pillar arrays under compression. Fabrication and assembly of Organ Chips involves equipment and steps that can be implemented outside of a traditional cleanroom. This protocol provides researchers with access to Organ Chip technology for in vitro organ- and body-level studies in drug discovery, safety and efficacy testing, as well as mechanistic studies of fundamental biological processes.
Introduction
Here, we describe the fabrication of dual channel, vascularized Organ-on-a-Chip (Organ Chip) microfluidic culture devices using a scalable protocol amenable for use by research groups lacking access to cleanrooms and traditional soft lithography tools. These devices have been developed to recapitulate human organ-level functions for understanding normal and disease physiology, as well as drug responses in vitro1,2. Critical to engineering this functionality are two perfused microfluidic channels separated by a semi-permeable membrane (Figure 1). This design enables recreation of tissu....
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Protocol
1. General Preparation
- To avoid debris, clean work area using packing tape and wipe down area with a cleanroom wipe and isopropyl alcohol.
- For all steps requiring PDMS, mix PDMS at a 10:1 ratio (10 g of cross linking agent, 100 g of elastomer base). Mix by hand or with a commercially available mixer. Use a planetary centrifugal mixer here: mixing for 2 minutes at 2000 rpm, then degassing the PDMS for 2 minutes at 2200 rpm.
- Clean all molds with air gun to blow out debris prior to use.
CAUTION: Do not use metal forceps to remove debris as it will damage the surface of the molds.
2. ....
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Results
The protocol presented here describes the scalable fabrication of PDMS Organ Chips. These devices enable culture of two distinct perfused tissue types on an elastic porous membrane (Figure 1). The PDMS channels are cast using 3D printed molds, which accelerates prototyping of new designs (Figure 2A and 2B). Top channels are cast in molds under compression against a compliant polyurethane gasket to produce compone.......
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Discussion
The fabrication process relies on high resolution 3D printed molds to pattern the PDMS top and bottom Organ Chip body components coupled with micromolded porous PDMS membranes. This critical approach was selected due to ease of prototyping combined with rapid transition into scaled up fabrication and replacement of tooling. The top component molds are designed to pattern ports in precise locations with defined vertical profiles during the casting step. This not only avoids the labor involved in manually punching access p.......
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Disclosures
D.E.I. is a founder and holds equity in Emulate, Inc., and chairs its scientific advisory board. J.P. is presently an employee of Emulate, Inc. R.N., Y.C., J.P., and D.E.I. are inventors on intellectual property that has been licensed to Emulate, Inc.
Acknowledgements
We thank M. Rousseau and S. Kroll for help with photography and videography and M. Ingram, J. Nguyen, D. Shea, and N. Wen for contributions to initial fabrication protocol development. This research was sponsored by the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency under Cooperative Agreements #W911NF-12-2-0036 and #W911NF-16-C-0050, and FDA grant #HHSF223201310079C, NIH grants #R01-EB020004 and #UG3-HL141797-01, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation grants #OPP1163237 and #OPP1173198 to DEI. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be int....
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Materials
| Name | Company | Catalog Number | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Protective Equipment | |||
| Hairnet | VWR | 89107-770 | |
| Tyvek lab coat | VWR | 13450-506 | |
| Extended cuff gloves | VWR | 89521-898 | |
| Equipment | |||
| Cutting mat | VWR | 102096-430 | |
| Tile cutter | McMaster-Carr | 26765A31 | |
| Mold-in-place (MIP) top molds | Protolabs, Inc. | custom | printed in Prototherm 12120 |
| Mold-in-place (MIP) bottom molds | Protolabs, Inc. | custom | printed in Prototherm 12121 |
| Duckbill curved forceps | VWR | 63041-864 | |
| Sharp tipped forceps | Electron Microscopy Sciences | 72700-D | |
| Metal spatula | VWR | 82027-528 | |
| Deep reactive ion etch (DRIE) pillar array wafers | Sensera, Inc. | custom | Four 50 x 50 mm pillar arrays per wafer; pillars 7 um wide, 50 um tall, spaced hexagonally 40 um apart |
| Textured polycarbonate .01” thick | McMaster-Carr | 85585K33 | cut to 45 mm square |
| PDMS blocks (40 x 40 x 5 mm) | n/a | custom | |
| Laminar flow hood | Germfree | BVBI | cast in-house |
| Air gun | |||
| 60°C level oven | |||
| Vacuum desiccator | |||
| Mass balance | accuracy to 0.1 g | ||
| Plasma machine | Diener | Nano | oxygen plasma capability is critical |
| Supplies | |||
| Sylgard 184 poly (dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) base/curing agent kit | Ellsworth Adhesives | 4019862 | |
| Mixing cup | Ensure adequate ventilation when handling prepolymer due to low levels of ethylbenzene | ||
| 1 mL syringe | VWR | 10099-395 | |
| Cleanroom wipes | VWR | TWTX1080 | |
| 25 x 75 mm glass microscope slides | VWR | 48311-703 | |
| Packing tape | VWR | 500043-724 | |
| Scotch tape | VWR | 500026-873 | |
| Die-cut Polyurethane (PU) strips | Atlantic Gasket, Inc. | custom: AGWI2X3 | 1/8” thick; 60 Durometer Black Polyurethane; 2” x 3” |
| Polycarbonate film .005” thick | McMaster-Carr | 85585K102 | |
| 100 x 100 x 15 mm square gridded petri dishes | VWR | 60872-480 | |
| Aluminum foil | |||
| Optional Equipment | |||
| Thinky PDMS Mixer | Thinky | ARE-310 | |
| Mold-in place (MIP) jig | in-house | screw clamp compression jig | |
| Automated membrane fabricator (AMF) | in-house | pneumatic compression piston array with programmable heater |
References
- Bhatia, S. N., Ingber, D. E. Microfluidic organs-on-chips. Nature Biotechnology. 32 (8), 760-772 (2014).
- Benam, K. H., et al. Engineered In vitro Disease Models. Annual Review of Pathology Mechanisms of Disease. 10 (1), 195-262 (2015).
- Huh, D., et al.
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Reprints and Permissions
Erratum
Formal Correction: Erratum: Scalable Fabrication of Stretchable, Dual Channel, Microfluidic Organ Chips
Posted by JoVE Editors on 5/08/2019. Citeable Link.
An erratum was issued for: Scalable Fabrication of Stretchable, Dual Channel, Microfluidic Organ Chips. The Representative Results, Discussion, and References sections have been updated.
In the Representative Results section, the legend for Figure 5 has been updated from:
Figure 5: Permeability of inert tracer Cascade Blue through the microporous PDMS membrane. Cascade Blue hydrazide dye in medium was loaded into the top channel of the Organ Chip and perfused at 60 µL/h to measure the flux of the dye across the membrane into the bottom channel containing medium. Empty chips were compared to Gut Chips with Caco2-BBe1 cells in the apical channel and human vascular endothelial cells (HUVEC) in the basal channel cultured for 6 days. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.
to:
Figure 5: Permeability of inert tracer Cascade Blue through the microporous PDMS membrane. Cascade Blue hydrazide dye in medium was loaded into the top channel of the Organ Chip and perfused at 60 µl/h to measure the flux of the dye across the membrane into the bottom channel containing medium. Empty chips were compared to Gut Chips with Caco2-BBe1 cells in the apical channel and human vascular endothelial cells (HUVEC) in the basal channel cultured for 6 days. The apparent permeability (Papp, cm/s) of the microporous PDMS membrane was determined using the dye concentration in the outlet channels. The gut chip cell layers provide a significantly increased barrier to permeability. Error bars indicate standard error of the mean.
In the Discussion section, the fourth paragraph has been updated from:
Troubleshooting the resulting Organ Chips takes place at two levels: during the fabrication process and during Organ Chip culture. We have developed a visual method for quality assurance (QA) of through-hole formation in the cast membranes that greatly accelerates the production process while improving the quality and reliability of assembled Organ Chips. This QA method allows for process troubleshooting, and we recommend keeping a record of process conditions to enable tracking fabrication problems that may occur during cell culture. During Organ Chip culture, inert tracer dyes are the simplest method of measuring barrier function to troubleshoot the fabrication process and cell culture steps. Lucifer Yellow has been used historically due to its small molecular mass and innate fluorescence, but Cascade Blue offers similar properties with a narrower emission spectrum that is less likely to interfere with downstream assays. Larger molecules, such as poly-ethyleneglycol (PEG)- or dextran-conjugated fluorophores are larger and consequently result in lower permeability overall and lower sensitivity. The apparent permeability (Papp, cm/s) of tracer dyes can be used to determine barrier function properties of organs or tissues (Figure 4). The following equation can be used to calculate Papp between the dosing channel and receiving channel and is derived from equations used primarily for Transwell studies19,20 and corrects for tracer dye loss caused by absorption into PDMS by comparing the two output flows and not relying on mass balance assumptions at the outflow.
to:
Troubleshooting the resulting Organ Chips takes place at two levels: during the fabrication process and during Organ Chip culture. We have developed a visual method for quality assurance (QA) of through-hole formation in the cast membranes that greatly accelerates the production process while improving the quality and reliability of assembled Organ Chips. This QA method allows for process troubleshooting, and we recommend keeping a record of process conditions to enable tracking fabrication problems that may occur during cell culture. During Organ Chip culture, inert tracer dyes are the simplest method of measuring barrier function to troubleshoot the fabrication process and cell culture steps. Lucifer Yellow has been used historically due to its small molecular mass and innate fluorescence, but Cascade Blue offers similar properties with a narrower emission spectrum that is less likely to interfere with downstream assays. Larger molecules, such as poly-ethyleneglycol (PEG)- or dextran-conjugated fluorophores are larger and consequently result in lower permeability overall and lower sensitivity. The apparent permeability (Papp, cm/s) of tracer dyes can be used to determine barrier function properties of organs or tissues (Figure 5). The following equation derived by Tran, et al.19 can be used to calculate Papp between the dosing channel and receiving channel, which partially corrects for tracer dye loss caused by absorption into PDMS by averaging the two output flows and not relying on mass balance assumptions at the outflow.
The References section has been updated from:
- Blaser, D.W. Determination of drug absorption parameters in Caco-2 cell monolayers with a mathematical model encompassing passive diffusion, carrier-mediated efflux, non-specific binding and phase II metabolism. at <http://edoc.unibas.ch/655/1/DissB_7998.pdf> (2007).
- Hubatsch, I., Ragnarsson, E.G.E., Artursson, P. Determination of drug permeability and prediction of drug absorption in Caco-2 monolayers. Nature Protocols. 2 (9), 2111-2119 (2007).
- Henry, O.Y.F. et al. Organs-on-chips with integrated electrodes for trans-epithelial electrical resistance (TEER) measurements of human epithelial barrier function. Lab on a Chip. 17 (13), 2264-2271 (2017).
- Maoz, B.M. et al. Organs-on-Chips with combined multi-electrode array and transepithelial electrical resistance measurement capabilities. Lab on a Chip. 17 (13), 2294-2302 (2017).
- Benam, K.H. et al. Matched-Comparative Modeling of Normal and Diseased Human Airway Responses Using a Microengineered Breathing Lung Chip. Cell Systems. 3 (5), 456-466.e4 (2016).
to:
- Tran, T.T. et al. Exact kinetic analysis of passive transport across a polarized confluent MDCK cell monolayer modeled as a single barrier. Journal of Pharmaceutical Sciences. 93 (8), 2108–2123 (2004).
- Henry, O.Y.F. et al. Organs-on-chips with integrated electrodes for trans-epithelial electrical resistance (TEER) measurements of human epithelial barrier function. Lab on a Chip. 17 (13), 2264-2271 (2017).
- Maoz, B.M. et al. Organs-on-Chips with combined multi-electrode array and transepithelial electrical resistance measurement capabilities. Lab on a Chip. 17 (13), 2294-2302 (2017).
- Benam, K.H. et al. Matched-Comparative Modeling of Normal and Diseased Human Airway Responses Using a Microengineered Breathing Lung Chip. Cell Systems. 3 (5), 456-466.e4 (2016).
