Wholly vascularized millimeter-sized engineered tissues by cell-sized microscaffolds

The in vitro fabrication of wholly vascularized millimeter-sized engineered tissues is still a key challenge in the tissue engineering field. Recently we reported a unique approach ‘sedimentary culture’ using a collagen microfiber (CMF) to fabricate large-scale engineered tissues. The millimeter-sized tissues with high extracellular matrix (ECM) density were easily obtained by centrifugation of cells and CMFs and subsequent cultivation because the CMFs acted as a micrometer-sized scaffold. However, cell distribution in the obtained tissues was not homogeneous because of the different sedimentation velocity of the cells and CMFs because of their size difference. Here we report the fabrication of wholly vascularized millimeter-sized engineered tissues using cell-sized CMFs. To avoid dissolving, vacuum drying was performed at 200 °C for 24 h for thermal crosslinking of primary amine groups of type I collagen. The 200- and 20-μm-sized CMFs (CMF-200 and CMF-20) were obtained by homogenization and subsequent sonication of the crosslinked collagen. Interestingly, the CMF-20 indicated a similar sedimentation velocity with cells because of their same size range, thus uniform millimeter-sized tissue with homogeneous cell distribution was fabricated by the sedimentary culture method. To form a whole blood capillary structure in the tissues, fibronectin (FN) was adsorbed on the surface of CMF-20 to stimulate endothelial cell migration. The distribution of the blood capillary network in 1.6-mm-sized tissues was markedly improved by FN-adsorbed CMF-20 (FN-CMF-20). Sedimentary culture using FN-CMF-20 will create new opportunities in tissue engineering for the in vitro fabrication of wholly vascularized millimeter-sized engineered tissues.