Flow Analysis of a Porous Polymer-Based Three-Dimensional Cell Culture Device for Drug Screening

A porous polymer-based three-dimensional (3D) cell culture device has been developed as an in vitro tissue model system for the cytotoxicity of anticancer drug test. The device had two chambers connected in tandem, each loaded with a 3D scaffold made of highly biocompatible poly (lactic acid) (PLA). Hepatoma cells (HepG2) and glioblastoma multiforme (GBM) cancer cells were cultured in the two separate porous scaffolds. A peristaltic pump was adopted to realize a perfusion cell culture. In this study, we focus on cell viability inside the 3D porous scaffolds under flow-induced shear stress effects. A flow simulation was conducted to predict the shear stress based on a realistic representation of the porous structure. The simulation results were correlated to the cell variability measurements at different flow rates. It is shown that the modeling approach presented in this paper can be useful for shear stress predication inside porous scaffolds and the computational fluid dynamics model can be an effective way to optimize the operation parameters of perfused 3D cell culture devices.