Breaking the Mold

Project Description

BU is known for developing scaffolds that support self-assembled engineered cardiac tissue (ECT) derived from human induced pluripotent stem cells. Most of these scaffolds feature pairs of identical compliant pillars between which the ECT is suspended.Spontaneous contraction of the ECT bends the pillars, and contractile force can be inferred from video images of pillar deflections. A higher resolution of this force measurement could be obtained by narrowing the field of view to observe deflection of only one pillar, and assuming that the other pillar deflection was identical. Even better would be to create a scaffold with one rigid pillar and one compliant pillar, so that all deflection could be observed in a narrow field of view around the compliant pillar. In this project, the REU student will design, fabricate, and test such a scaffold, comparing results with that of a conventional scaffold.

Mentors

Thomas Bifano    Ruifeng Hu 
• Design and model an asymmetric pillar scaffold
• Layout a CAD model of a mold that can be used to fabricate prototype scaffolds from PDMS
• Fabricate PDMS pillars and measure their effective lateral stiffnesses
• Evaluate contractile force measurements with the conventional and new scaffolds
• Design a scalable version of the mold to be used in a high-throughput platform
• Modeling mechanical compliance of polymer structures
• Understanding PDMS molding and mold making processes
• Fabrication of reproducible PDMS scaffolds
• Learn how to test and evaluate optical and mechanical performance of a system