Xavier Intes and Guohao Dai in Biomaterials Journal

One of the major challenges in tissue engineering field is the lack of a functional vasculature with adequate perfusion. Biomedical Engineering Department faculty Dr. Xavier Intes and Dr. Guohao Dai have led the team of investigators to develop an integrated platform that combines 3-D tissue printing and 3-D tissue imaging to study vasculature formation in thick tissues. They developed an integrated a robotic 3-D cell printing technology with a mesoscopic fluorescence molecular tomography imaging system, and demonstrated the capability of the platform to construct perfused collagen scaffolds with endothelial lining and to image both the fluid flow and fluorescent-labeled living endothelial cells at high-frame rates, with high sensitivity and accuracy. These results establish the potential of the integrated system for engineering and imaging thick tissue construct in the future. Biomedical Engineering graduate student Lingling Zhao performed the imaging studies, and Vivian Lee designed the method of 3-D tissue printing. Their work has been published in recent issue of Biomaterials journal. View article: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142961212004012