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. But it is still difficult to build and mimic a hepatic lobule rapidly. Besides, it is an important issue to observe the liver cells activity differences in different concentrations of drug. Rebuilding hepatic lobule and observing the actions of liver cells are the main targets in this thesis. 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. During the patterning process, the viability of cells is a key issue, so we use FDA/EtBr assay to accomplish the viability tests. After the cell-patterning is finished, stable and continuous concentration gradient of drug is generated by simple microchannel design. Then, different concentrations of culture media are injected into four bioreactors so that the concentrations of culture media are different in four bioreactors. Finally, we observe the effect for liver cells by different concentrations of culture media.