(1264-A) Development of a composable permeable membrane support

Abstract: Recently, there is strong interest on three-dimensional (3D) cell culture and its substrate platform in bio-engineering field because they can mimic cell behavior under in-vivo conditions more closely. There are several types of biomaterials such as 3D printed structure, hydrogel, nanofibers, and salt-leached porous structures, which can provide 3D environment or in-vivo-like conditions to cells. Especially, a permeable membrane support plays an important role in mimicking in-vivo-like environment with material transport, motility and co-culture. Therefore, various studies combining biomaterials and permeable membrane support have been presented. However, existing permeable membrane support products show troublesome limitations on flexibility in application and combination with biomaterials, and ease of handling. Here, we present a composable permeable membrane support which can combine with various types of membranes. This structure can replace the conventional permeable membrane support with allowing assembling and disassembling parts (membranes and support structure) over multiple times. Though the experiments, it was demonstrated that this structure could be applied to various types of membranes such as nanofibers, existing porous membrane/films, and collagen membranes with Improved convenience of cell observation and analysis in variety of assays. Subsequently, it was presented that the structure could overcome the limitations of conventional permeable membrane support. This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIP) (NRF-2021R1A2C2014364) and the Korean Fund for Regenerative Medicine(KFRM) grant funded by the Korea government (the Ministry of Science and ICT, the Ministry of Health & Welfare) (22C0613L1).