The Automation Partnership will unveil Raft (Real Architecture for 3D Tissue), a system for generating reproducible 3D collagen tissue constructs at TERMIS on 13-17 June in Galway, Ireland.
Raft will be showcased at the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society (TERMIS) conference.
It is a system for scientists to create consistent, well-defined 3D tissues in a convenient, simple-to-use format.
It has been developed in collaboration with tissue-engineering academics and uses a novel, patented technology for making multi-cellular 3D tissue constructs rapidly (<1 hour), simply and reproducibly.
Cells and neutralised collagen are mixed, pipetted into a special 24-well plate and incubated.
Gentle, controlled compression is applied to the cell-seeded hydrogels (by absorbent plungers), which removes some liquid, increasing the cell and collagen concentration 100-fold.
The construct surface can be embossed with micro-scale topology, and could be used to mimic the in vivo stem cell microenvironment and then culture a different cell type on the surface.
Raft allows complex multi-layer tissues to be formed - with different cell types in each layer- and cells to be co-cultured in a well-controlled way.
The resulting biomimetic tissues, made from fibrillar collagen (the main component of extracellular matrix), are strong, transparent and 50-100um thick.
The Automation Partnership has developed a workstation and consumables to automate and scale-up this 3D tissue production process, enabling up to 24 tissues to be made in parallel.
Tissues are made either in the wells of a 24-well plate; on permeable membrane inserts for barrier assays or cultured at an air/liquid interface, for example, to form stratified epithelia.
The tissue remains in the same well from its creation until the end of the experiment and can be analysed using standard techniques.
Dr Rosemary Drake, chief scientific officer at the Automation Partnership, will also be giving a presentation, entitled 'Raft - Real Architecture for 3D Tissue, a New Technology for Simple and Reliable Creation of Highly Biomimetic Tissue'.
This will take place at the lunchtime presentations on 14 June and will outline proof-of-concept data, where Raft has been used to produce epithelial tissues.
It will also describe how Raft is being used at University College London's Institute of Ophthalmology to generate reproducible 3D human corneal tissues for use in pre-clinical studies.
