Magnetically-Assisted Microfluidic Printing for the Fabrication of Anisotropic Skeletal Muscle Structure

Microfluidic printing provides a novel tool to facilitate the bulk assembly of cell-aligned microfibers for the fabrication of artificial skeletal muscle structure. However, due to the poor controllability for the deposition position of the microfiber, it is still difficult to realize the anisotropic assembly. In this letter, we developed a magnetically-assisted microfluidic printing system to solve this problem. Magnetic nanoparticles (MNPs) were encapsulated in the microfluidic spun microfibers, and a spiral magnet was designed as a microfiber deposition substrate. A robotic visual servoing was utilized to control the orifice posture of the microfluidic spinning system relative to the axis direction of the spiral magnet, and then the spun microfibers were continuously deposited layer by layer to form an anisotropic assembly structure. Our proposed method demonstrates that the magnetic attraction mechanism is a novel microfiber-specific micromanipulation strategy for stable deposition in liquid environment. Furthermore, the preliminary cell experiments show that our method has high biocompatibility to be further used in the fabrication of anisotropic skeletal muscle tissue.