Future medicine is bound to include extensive tissue-engineering technologies such as organs-on-chips and organoids - miniature organs grown from stem cells. But all this is predicated on a simple yet challenging task: controlling cellular behavior in three dimensions. So far,most cell culture approaches are limited to two-dimensional environments (e.g. a Petri dish or a chip), but that neither matches real biology nor helps us sculpt tissues and organs. Two EPFL scientists beget now developed a novel method that uses lasers to carve out paths inside biocompatible gels to locally influence cell function and promote tissue formation. The work is published in Advanced Materials.
Source: phys.org