Microfluidic devices in tissue engineering

Abstract Microfluidics deals with the manipulation of small fluid volumes within a system of microchannels. Microfluidic devices are widely used in biological sciences, and specifically in tissue engineering to either repair or replace damaged cells, tissues or organs. Indeed, microfluidic systems can provide opportunities for various tissue engineering applications, such as cell culture, scaffold synthesis, drug screening, point-of-care detection, and fabrication of therapeutic devices in a rapid, precise, and high-throughput manner. With regard to tissue engineering, this technology has several advantages compared with traditional 2D and 3D cell culture methods, including spatiotemporal controllability, control over fluid and gas flow, physiological mimicry of living tissue, and high-throughput analysis with smaller sample sizes. Moreover, microdevices are not faced with the costs and ethical concerns of animal experiments. This chapter will first review some techniques and materials used in the fabrication of microfluidic devices. Recent progress in microfluidic-based tissue engineering and some examples of successful studies in organ-on-a-chip and cancer applications will be discussed.