Abstract
A liver labchip integrating the DEP-based cell patterning technique and the microfluidic system for reconstructing the engineered liver tissue with the feature of liver function enhancement is demonstrated and reported in this paper. DEP forces are utilized as the cell-patterning mechanism to manipulate heterogeneous cells for mimicking the inherent hepatic morphology and increasing the cell-cell interaction. An ethoxyresorufin-O-dealkylase assay was performed to study the liver function enhancement of the engineered liver tissues. Experiment results show that the P450-1A1 enzyme activity of engineered liver tissues are 68.41% enhanced comparing with non-patterned liver cells.