In vitro proliferation and long-term preservation of functional primary rat hepatocytes in cell fibers.

Primary hepatocytes are essential cellular resources for drug screening and medical transplantation. While culture systems have already succeeded in reconstituting the biomimetic microenvironment of primary hepatocytes, acquiring additional capabilities to handle them easily as well as to expand them remains unmet needs. This paper describes a culture system for primary rat hepatocytes, based on cell fiber technology, that brings scalability and handleability.

Smooth muscle-like tissue constructs with circumferentially oriented cells formed by the cell fiber technology.

The proper functioning of many organs and tissues containing smooth muscles greatly depends on the intricate organization of the smooth muscle cells oriented in appropriate directions. Consequently controlling the cellular orientation in three-dimensional (3D) cellular constructs is an important issue in engineering tissues of smooth muscles. However, the ability to precisely control the cellular orientation at the microscale cannot be achieved by various commonly used 3D tissue engineering building blocks such as spheroids.