Bio-Pick, Place, and Perfuse: A New Instrument for Three-Dimensional Tissue Engineering

Research Overview

Borrowing from the pick-and-place machines of electronics assembly, this study built the Bio-P3: an instrument that grips large multicellular building parts, transports them under x-y-z control, and places them precisely in a build area while continuously perfusing them. The parts themselves — spheroids, toroids, and honeycombs — were self-assembled scaffold-free by seeding cells into nonadhesive micro-molds.

Parts survived gripping, transport, and release with little to no effect on viability or structure, then fused into larger contiguous tissue — a route toward fabricating large, high-cell-density constructs from molded microtissue building blocks.