Multicompartment hydrogel microcapsules for creating spatially patterned cell co-cultures

There is increasing clinical evidence that pancreatic dysfunction in diabetes needs to be viewed in the context of crosstalk with the liver as well as other organs. Our goal for this study was to develop a pancreas-liver co-culture system suited for mechanistic and therapy testing studies in the context of multi-organ cross talk. To achieve this goal, we developed a co-axial flow-focusing microfluidic device to fabricate multi-compartment hydrogel microcapsules. Each microcapsule contained two aqueous compartments or cores surrounded by poly(ethylene glycol) (PEG) hydrogel. Each microcapsule had pancreatic β-cells loaded into one compartment and hepatic cells into another compartment. Individual encapsulated cells assembled into pancreatic and hepatic cell spheroids over time. Characterization of microcapsules revealed enhanced hepatic and pancreatic function in microcapsules containing pancreas-liver co-cultures compared to microcapsules with one cell type only. Multicompartment microcapsules represent a novel microphysiological system type and hold the promise of increasing experiment throughput for mechanism discovery and drug development studies.