"Microtissues in Micromolded Hydrogels: Reducing Animal Use With In Vitro Tissue Analogues."

Pharmaceutics is a multi-billion dollar industry investing heavily in two-dimensional cell culture and expensive, inefficient and often unnecessary animal research. We have developed a novel, high throughput technology for generating micro-tissues of prescribed geometry in non-adhesive, agarose hydrogels micro-molded from sterile casts of wax models designed in CAD. These hydrogels will be used first to investigate intracellular contributions to self-assembly, then to investigate the applicability of the technology as a replacement for animal research in clinical or pharmacological trails. Further, the technology will be actively shared with both scientific and commercial communities for the promotion of more responsible research.