Development of a simple and low-cost automated cell sheet harvesting system for tissue engineering

摘要

Recent progress in cell sheet engineering has the potential to overcome many limitations in tissue engineering. However, the cell sheet construction process, currently carried out manually by skilled researchers, has been shown to be labor-intensive and time-consuming. To overcome this problem and improve the efficiency, procedures used in the cell sheet technology should be automated. Here, we described the development of a simple and low-cost automated cell harvesting system for the construction of multi-layered cell sheets. The automatic apparatus consisted of two orthogonally positioned stepper motors, each attached to a ball-screw slide. A holder for a gelatin stamp, which was used as a cell sheet transfer vehicle, was assembled to the vertical slide. The multi-axis movement of the system was controlled using an algorithm in LabView. Our result demonstrated that our automated system provided sufficiently high position accuracy and repeatability. Monolayer and triple-layered chondrocyte cell sheets could be constructed using this automated cell sheet harvesting system.