Driving Cell Seeding Using Surface Acoustic Wave Fluid Actuation

In this paper, we investigate the ability to drive fluid streaming via a surface acoustic wave (SAW) into a porous bioscaffold structure, and to exploit this effect to deliver fluorescent particles/yeast cells into the scaffold as a potential rapid and efficient method for cell seeding in tissue engineering. The results demonstrate that the seeding process takes approximately 10 seconds, much shorter than that if the cell suspension were to perfuse through the scaffold under the effects of gravity alone (approximately 30 mins). By increasing the input power, both the velocity of the fluid flow and the particle seeding efficiency can be enhanced. At 560 mW, fluid velocities of the order 10 mm/s were achieved; in this case, the particle/yeast seeding efficiency is around 92%. In addition to rapid seeding, the SAW streaminginduced perfusion is observed to significantly improve the uniformity of the scaffold cell distribution due to greater penetration into the scaffold. Finally, we verify using a methylene violet staining procedure that 80% of the yeast cells seeded by the SAW method within the scaffold remained viable.