Highly reproducible tissue positioning with tapered pillar design in engineered heart tissue platforms

We present a novel design of elastic micropillars for tissue self-assembly in engineered heart tissue (EHT) platforms. The innovative tapered profile confines reproducibly the tissue position along the main micropillar axis, increasing the accuracy of tissue contraction force measurement. Polydimethylsiloxane-based pillars were designed and...

Recording Neuronal Activity On Chip with Segmented 3D Microelectrode Arrays

We present preliminary recordings on chip of three-dimensional (3D) electric neuronal activity from cultures of cortical neurons derived from human-induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs). The recordings were obtained through 3D microelectrode arrays (MEAs) composed of truncated, 90 μm-high Si micropyramids endowed with multiple, electrically...

Dual-Gate Fet-Based Charge Sensor Enhanced by In-Situ Electrode Decoration in a MEMS Organs-On-Chip Platform

Continuous monitoring of tissue microphysiology is a key enabling feature of the organ-on-chip (OoC) approach for drug screening and disease modeling. Sensing charged species in OoC tissue microenvironments is thereby essential. However, the inherently small (i.e., cm) size of OoC devices poses the challenging requirement to integrate...

Microelectromechanical Organs-on-Chip

Stemming from the convergence of tissue engineering and microfluidics, organ-on-chip (OoC) technology can reproduce in vivo-like dynamic microphysiological environments for tissues in vitro. The possibility afforded by OoC devices of realistic recapitulation of tissue and organ (patho)physiology may hold the key to bridge the current...

A Miniaturized EHT Platform for Accurate Measurements of Tissue Contractile Properties

We present a wafer-scale fabricated, PDMS-based platform for culturing miniaturized engineered heart tissues (EHTs) which allows highly accurate measurements of the contractile properties of these tissues. The design of the platform is an anisometrically downscaled version of the Heart-Dyno system, consisting of two elastic micropillars inside...

Micro-fabricated channel with ultra-thin yet ultra-strong windows enables electron microscopy under 4-bar pressure

Transmission electron microscopy (TEM) of (de-)hydrogenation reactions is crucial to characterize efficiency of hydrogen storage materials. The nanoreactor, a micromachined channel with 15-nm-thick windows, effectively confines the gas flow to an electron-transparent chamber during TEM of reactions. Realistic experiments require very high...