Laser-printed 3D full-thickness skin equivalent morphology and metabolism monitoring by dual-mode OCT/Fluorescence system

Abstract

The 3D architecture of native human skin is a crucial requirement in investigating the skin in health and pathologies, wound healing, and testing of skin cosmetic and care product safety and personalized skin disease treatments. In this research, we used human skin cell lines to build full-thickness skin equivalents (FSE). Tissue regenerative medicine is based on tissue engineering and so far, FSE is well known approach to developing healthy and pathological skin models. Here we architected 3D printed high-resolution scaffolds for the growth and maturation of the FSEs also developed and validated custom-built combined fluorescence spectroscopy (FS) and optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging system for indestructible assessing metabolism and morphology of developed human FSEs on 3D printed scaffolds. This system demonstrated high sensitivity in detecting fluorescence from nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) and riboflavin 5’-adenosine diphosphate (FAD) in solutions and cell suspensions, and high-resolution imaging of FSE morphology. Thus, our developed multimodal optical system can be used in the future for the assessment of metabolism, maturation, and viability of 3D models of biological tissues in time-course development.