(416c) Deterministic Lateral Displacement as a Means to Enrich Large Cells for Tissue Engineering

Microfluidic separation techniques are attractive for applications in tissue engineering because of their low cost and ability handle small sample volumes. In certain tissue engineering applications, such as cardiac tissue engineering, the enrichment of a functional cell type is carried out from a suspension of digested donor tissue prior to seeding into scaffolds to create functional tissue. If the target cell type is of considerably different size from other cell types present in the digestate, deterministic lateral displacement is a highly attractive mode of separation compared to conventional approaches that rely on sieve-based techniques or pre-plating (where adhesive, non-target cell types are removed by preferential adhesion to cell culture dish surfaces). This presentation will describe the design and operation of a microfluidic device that is designed to enrich cardiac muscle cells by deterministic lateral displacement. This device consists of obstacles places in a staggered arrangement that allows target cells above a specified critical diameter to become progressively displaced laterally while the smaller, non-target cells remain in their streamlines. The target cell purity obtained is >98%.