Microfluidic Patterning for Fabrication of Contractile Cardiac Organoids

The development of in vitro methods of engineering three-dimensional cardiac tissues can be useful for tissue replacement, diagnostics and drug discovery. Here, we introduce the use of patterned hyaluronic acid (HA) substrates generated using microfluidic patterning as a method of fabricating 3D cardiac organoids. HA micropatterns served as inductive templates for organoid assembly. Upon seeding, cardiomyocytes elongated and aligned along the pattern direction attaching preferentially to the glass substrate and the interface between HA patterns and glass substrate. After 3 days in culture, the linearly aligned myocytes detached from the surface and formed contractile cardiac organoids. The procedure can be utilized to simply, rapidly and inexpensively create in vitro cardiac tissue models.