A mechanobiological mathematical model of liver metabolism

The liver plays a complex role in metabolism and detoxification, and better tools are needed to understand its function and to develop liver-targeted therapies. In this study, we establish a mechanobiological model of liver transport and hepatocyte biology to elucidate the metabolism of urea and albumin, the production/detoxification of ammonia, and consumption of oxygen and nutrients. Since hepatocellular shear stress (SS) can influence the enzymatic activities of liver, the effect of SS on the urea and albumin synthesis are empirically modeled through the mechanotransduction mechanisms. The results demonstrate that the rheology and dynamics of the sinusoid flow can significantly affect liver metabolism. We show that perfusate rheology and blood hematocrit can affect urea and albumin production by changing hepatocyte mechanosensitive metabolism. The model can also simulate enzymatic diseases of the liver such as hyperammonemia I, hyperammonemia II, hyperarginemia, citrollinemia, and argininosuccinicaciduria, which disrupt the urea metabolism and ammonia detoxification. The model is also able to predict how aggregate cultures of hepatocytes differ from single cell cultures. We conclude that in vitro perfusable devices for the study of liver metabolism or personalized medicine should be designed with similar morphology and fluid dynamics as patient liver tissue. This robust model can be adapted to any type of hepatocyte culture to determine how hepatocyte viability, functionality, and metabolism are influenced by liver pathologies and environmental conditions.

Simulative Minimization of Mass Transfer Limitations Within Hydrogel-Based 3D-Printed Enzyme Carriers

In biotechnology, immobilization of functional reactants is often done as a surface immobilization on small particles. Examples are chromatography columns and fixed-bed reactors. However, the available surface for immobilization is directly linked to particle diameter and bed porosity for these systems, leading to high backpressure for small particle sizes. When larger molecules, such as enzymes are immobilized, physical entrapment within porous materials like hydrogels is an alternative. An emerging technique for the production of geometrically structured, three-dimensional and scalable hollow bodies is 3D-printing. Different bioprinting methods are available to produce structures of the desired size, resolution and solids content. However, in case of entrapped enzymes mass transfer limitations often determine the achievable reactivities. With increasing complexity of the system, for example a fixed-bed reactor, 3D-simulation is indispensable to understand the local reaction conditions to be able to highlight the optimization potential. Based on experimental data, this manuscript shows the application of the dimensionless numbers effectiveness factor and Thiele modulus for the design of a 3D-printed flow-through reactor. Within the reactor, enzymes are physically entrapped in 3D-printed hydrogel lattices. The local reaction rate of the enzymes is directly dependent on the provided substrate amount at the site of reaction which is limited by the diffusion properties of the hydrogel matrix and the diffusion distance. All three parameters can be summed up by one key figure, the Thiele modulus, which, in short, quantifies mass transfer limitations of a catalytic system. Depending on the rate of the enzymatic reaction in correlation to the diffusional transport, mass transfer limitations will shift the optimum of the system, favoring slow enzyme kinetics and small diffusion distances. Comparison with the enzymatic reaction rate in solution yields the effectiveness factor of the system. As a result, the optimization potential of varying the 3D-printed geometries or the reaction rate within the experimentally available design space can be estimated.

Numerical Investigations of Hepatic Spheroids Metabolic Reactions in a Perfusion Bioreactor

Miniaturized culture systems of hepatic cells are emerging as a strong tool facilitating studies related to liver diseases and drug discovery. However, the experimental optimization of various parameters involved in the operation of these systems is time-consuming and expensive. Hence, developing numerical tools predicting the function of such systems can significantly reduce the associated cost. In this paper, a perfusion-based three dimensional (3D) bioreactor comprising encapsulated human liver hepatocellular carcinoma (HepG2) spheroids are analyzed. The flow and mass transfer equations for oxygen as well as different metabolites such as albumin, glucose, glutamine, ammonia, and urea were solved in three different domains, i.e., free flow, hydrogel, and spheroid porous media sections. Since the spheroids were encapsulated inside the hydrogel, shear stress imposed on them were found to be less than tolerable thresholds. The predicted cumulative albumin concentration over the 7 days of culture period showed a good agreement with the experimental data. Based on the critical role of oxygen supply to the hepatocytes, a parametric study was performed and the effect of various parameters was investigated. Results illustrated that convection mechanism was the dominant transport mechanism in the main-stream section contrary to the intra spheroids parts where the diffusion was the prevailing transport mechanism. In the hydrogel parts, the rate of diffusion and convection mechanisms were almost identical. As expected, higher perfusion rate would provide high oxygen level for the cells and, smaller spheroids with a diameter of 100 μm were at the low risk of hypoxic conditions due to short diffusive oxygen penetration depth. Numerical results evidenced that spheroids with diameter size >200 μm at low porosities (ε = 0.2-0.3) were at risk of oxygen depletion, especially at locations near the core center. Therefore, these results could be beneficial in preventing hypoxic conditions during in vitro experiments. The presented numerical model provides a numerical platform which can help researchers to design and optimize complex bioreactors and obtain numerical indexes of the main metabolites in a very short time prior to any fabrications. Such numerical indexes can be helpful in certifying the outcomes of forensic investigations.

Application areas of 3D bioprinting

Three dimensional (3D) bioprinting has been a powerful tool in patterning and precisely placing biologics, including living cells, nucleic acids, drug particles, proteins and growth factors, to recapitulate tissue anatomy, biology and physiology. Since the first time of cytoscribing cells demonstrated in 1986, bioprinting has made a substantial leap forward, particularly in the past 10 years, and it has been widely used in fabrication of living tissues for various application areas. The technology has been recently commercialized by several emerging businesses, and bioprinters and bioprinted tissues have gained significant interest in medicine and pharmaceutics. This Keynote review presents the bioprinting technology and covers a first-time comprehensive overview of its application areas from tissue engineering and regenerative medicine to pharmaceutics and cancer research.