Halil Tekin

Engineered tissues could be potentially useful in treating diseased tissues and organs, and are often used as models to test drug candidates. Native tissues have complex architectures, containing various cell types with different spatial arrangements and hence, replicating such complexity requires the knowledge and application of various engineering principles. Tissue engineering holds an important role to create biomimetic tissue constructs by using different methods, such as soft lithography and photolithography. One of these approaches uses micro-fabricated templates to form modular tissues. However, previously offered microstructures possess static properties, which limit their use in different applications. Our research focuses on fabricating dynamic platforms to form modules of biomimetic tissues and further induce their temperature controlled retrieval from the platforms. As such these modular tissues could be assembled to create large tissue constructs, and be potentially useful for in vitro studies, such as drug discovery. These dynamic microstructures could also be integrated within high-throughput screening systems and microfluidic platforms.