Abstract
Fluid flow is an integral part of microfluidic and organ-on-chip technology, ideally providing biomimetic fluid, cell, and nutrient exchange as well as physiological or pathological shear stress. Currently, many of the pumps that actively perfuse fluid at biomimetic flow rates are incompatible with use inside cell culture incubators, require many tubing connections, or are too large to run many devices in a confined space. To address these issues, we developed a user-friendly impeller pump that uses a 3D-printed device and impeller to recirculate fluid and cells on-chip. Impeller rotation was driven by a rotating magnetic field generated by magnets mounted on a computer fan; this pump platform required no tubing connections and could accommodate up to 36 devices at once in a standard cell culture incubator. A computational model was used to predict shear stress, velocity, and changes in pressure throughout the device. The impeller pump generated biomimetic fluid velocities (50-6400 μm s-1) controllable by tuning channel and inlet dimensions and the rotational speed of the impeller, which were comparable to the order of magnitude of the velocities predicted by the computational model. Predicted shear stress was in the physiological range throughout the microchannel and over the majority of the impeller. The impeller pump successfully recirculated primary murine splenocytes for 1 h and Jurkat T cells for 24 h with no impact on cell viability, showing the impeller pump's feasibility for white blood cell recirculation on-chip. In the future, we envision that this pump will be integrated into single- or multi-tissue platforms to study communication between organs.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 605-620 |
| Number of pages | 16 |
| Journal | Lab on a Chip |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue number | 3 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Feb 7 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Funding
The authors thank Katerina Morgaenko for technical assistance with printing devices and running initial viability experiments, and Alyssa Montalbine for technical assistance with printing devices. The authors thank Tochukwu Ozulumba for technical assistance with Jurkat T cells. The authors thank Michael Ly with MiiCraft for technical assistance. Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases of the National Institute of Health under Award Number R01AI131723. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.