Flexibly Deformable Collagen Hydrogel Tube Reproducing Immunological Tissue Deformation of Blood Vessels as a Pharmacokinetic Testing Model.

Since the biochemical reaction of blood vessels plays an essential role in immune response or various diseases, in vitro vascular models have high demand from medical fields. However, vascular models often tend to be difficult to mimic the biomedical reaction faithfully because of the lack of implementation of the tissue deformation. Here, we reproduce an inflammatory mediator-induced deformation reaction of a blood vessel on a flexibly deformable collagen hydrogel tube device. A self-standing collagen tube enables the tissue to deform flexibly in biochemical reaction and achieves contraction both at tissue and cell level. The contraction of tissue relieves the stress between cells under reaction to maintain cellular junctions even tight junctions are broken. Also, the drug perfusion test with anti-histamine chemical is easily performed due to the connector part and properly inhibits the inflammatory reaction. Moreover, the traction force on endothelial cells is analyzed as about 0.9 μN on two types of scaffolds with different stiffness. We believe that the potential of our flexible tissue model to reproduce biochemical reactions could contribute to the fabrication of vascular tissue models mimicking in vivo in high similarity as a platform for biomedical researches and pharmacokinetic testing. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.