Bioinspired multicompartmental microfibers are generated by novel capillary microfluidics. The resultant microfibers possess multicompartment body-and-shell compositions with specifically designed geometries. Potential use of these microfibers for tissue-engineering applications is demonstrated by creating multifunctional fibers with a spatially controlled encapsulation of cells.

"Organ-on-a-chip" systems integrate microengineering, microfluidic technologies, and biomimetic principles to create key aspects of living organs faithfully, including critical microarchitecture, spatiotemporal cell-cell interactions, and extracellular microenvironments. This creative platform and its multiorgan integration recapitulating organ-level structures and functions can bring unprecedented benefits to a diversity of applications, such as developing human in vitro models for healthy or diseased organs, enabling the investigation of fundamental mechanisms in disease etiology and organogenesis, benefiting drug development in toxicity screening and target discovery, and potentially serving as replacements for animal testing. Recent advances in novel designs and examples for developing organ-on-a-chip platforms are reviewed. The potential for using this emerging technology in understanding human physiology including mechanical, chemical, and electrical signals with precise spatiotemporal controls are discussed. The current challenges and future directions that need to be pursued for these proof-of-concept studies are also be highlighted.

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Aptamer-functionalized barcode particles are employed to capture and detect various types of circulating tumor cells (CTCs). The particles are spherical colloidal crystal clusters, and the reflection properties that arise from their structures are how their codes are evaluated. Aptamer functionalization (with TD05, Sgc8, and Sgd5) make the particles interact with specific CTC types; dendrimers are used to amplify the effect of the aptamers, allowing for increased sensitivity, reliability, and specificity in CTC capture, detection, and subsequent release.

We report a facile approach to encapsulating amoxicillin (AMX) within laponite (LAP)-doped poly(lactic-co-glycolic acid) (PLGA) nanofibers for biomedical applications. In this study, a synthetic clay material, LAP nanodisks, was first used to encapsulate AMX. Then, the AMX-loaded LAP nanodisks with an optimized AMX loading efficiency of 9.76 ± 0.57% were incorporated within PLGA nanofibers through electrospinning to form hybrid PLGA/LAP/AMX nanofibers. The loading of AMX within LAP nanodisks and the loading of LAP/AMX within PLGA nanofibers were characterized via different techniques. In vitro drug release profile, antimicrobial activity, and cytocompatibility of the formed hybrid PLGA/LAP/AMX nanofibers were also investigated. We show that the loading of AMX within LAP nanodisks does not lead to the change of LAP morphology and crystalline structure and the incorporation of LAP/AMX nanodisks does not significantly change the morphology of the PLGA nanofibers. Importantly, the loading of AMX within LAP-doped PLGA nanofibers enables a sustained release of AMX, much slower than that within a single carrier of LAP nanodisks or PLGA nanofibers. Further antimicrobial activity and cytocompatibility assays demonstrate that the antimicrobial activity of AMX toward the growth inhibition of a model bacterium of Staphylococcus aureus is not compromised after being loaded into the hybrid nanofibers, and the PLGA/LAP/AMX nanofibers display good cytocompatibility, similar to pure PLGA nanofibers. With the sustained release profile and the reserved drug activity, the organic/inorganic hybrid nanofiber-based drug delivery system may find various applications in tissue engineering and pharmaceutical science.