Abstract
With the development of Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) industry, the Lab-on-a-chip technology becomes a popular field in recent days. Because the scale of micro-device matches with cellular molecule, the interdisciplinary combinations of biological and engineering fields have been attracting a significant attention in the past few decades. The establishment of artificial liver is a trend in tissue engineering. However, it is so hard and slow to arrive the final goal --replace the damaged tissue of human. For this reason, there is a new approach to use engineered tissue to study human tissue physiology and pathophysiology in vitro. In vitro studies could control the environmental factors in experiments to observe the molecular processes between cell to cell. In this thesis, rebuilding hepatic lobule and observing the reactions of liver cells under various environments are the main targets. This research presents a Lab-on-a-chip device to achieve the cell-patterning function. Based on the polarity difference within cells caused by applying suitable frequency of the input voltage, we could use the dielectrophoresis (DEP) to manipulate cells and form the pattern of the hepatic lobule. After the cell-patterning is finished, stable and continuous logarithmically-varying concentrations of drug is generated via designing the flow resistance of micro channels. Then, different concentrations of drug with culture media are injected into four bioreactors. Finally, we could observe the effect for liver cells under different concentrations of drug by using this Lab-on-a-chip device.