Image-Guided Microvasculature Generation in Photodegradable Hydrogels

Abstract

The complex vascular networks that exist throughout living organisms are necessary to sustain life, transporting nutrients and oxygen to and waste products from tissues in the blood. Though recent advances in biofabrication have made substantial strides, success in replicating vascular complexities at native resolution and scale in anatomically defined patterns remains limited. In this thesis, I demonstrate that multiphoton sculpting of hyper-photodegradable hydrogels through a tiled image stack-guided methodology rapidly affords perfusable microvascular networks of unprecedented size and complexity. These results have major implications for studying vasculature biology in vitro and in the creation of functional engineered tissues for in vivo transplantation.