Guided wound healing of fibroblast in a microfluidic system with nanotopographical wrinkles

초록

A fibroblast plays an important role in a wound healing process to recover damaged tissues. An aligned fibroblast on the nanotopographical substrate can organize in-vivo extracellular matrix (ECM) formation by secreting oriented collagen fibers. Properly aligned ECM can cure damaged tissue effectively without scar formation while inducing the guided migration. A tip-scratch assay is typically fulfilled to explore wound healing. Trypsinization together with laminar flow applied in a microfluidic device can effectively replace the traditional tip-scratch assay to generate cell-free area on the cell culture substrate. To investigate wound healing process, we generated cell-free area over the cultured tissue by uniform trypsinization with laminar flow in a microfluidic system. Wrinkled substrates in a microchannel guided the morphologic change of cells and the formation of cytoskeletons. Our method can manipulate sizes of wound by flow control. Vertical wrinkles to the wound direction yielded the fastest and best wound healing.