Abstract
The ability to arrange living cells into an ordered tissue-mimic pattern is a rapidly developing and highly demanded technique for many applications in biological research and biotechnology. The re-establishment of heterogeneous cell co-culture and the meaningful tissue-like cell pattern are essential to functional tissue engineering. This paper reports a signal-communicated liver chip, which is consisted of hydrogel V-shaped barrier chambers and liver pattern chambers. The hydrogel V-shaped microbarriers were used to trap HMEC-1 cell for communicating cell signals. The liver pattern chambers were used to co-culture HepG2 and 3T3 cells. The purposes of this research are to develop the engineered liver tissue regulated not only by cell signal-communicated but also by liver pattern mimic platform. Finally, the liver albumin assay result successfully can be increased to 70 % than without HMEC-1 cells communication. © 2012 IEEE.