Parallel, Scalable and Customizable Production of Gel-Encapsulated Cells for Advanced Biomanufacturing and Therapeutics

Gel-encapsulated cells are at the heart of several emergent biotechnologies including cell-based therapeutics and bioprinting; however existing techniques such as microfluidics and batch emulsification cannot provide scalability and tunability simultaneously. An advanced manufacturing scheme to produce gel-encapsulated cells that is both scalable and universally compatible with encapsulants of different chemistry, mechanics, volumes, and/or shapes, and cargos that may include a range of cell lines or different molecular and biomolecular agents is needed. We report a universal strategy that enables the biomanufacturing of packageable and deployable bio-suspensions of gel-encapsulated cells and molecular/biomolecular cargos capable of meeting the demands of cell-based therapeutics and tissue printing. At the heart of our approach is an elastomeric chemical template that enables the simultaneous collection/assembly of spray-deposited liquid pre-polymer/cellular suspensions into photocrosslinkable microdroplets which can readily access liter-scale volumes of microgel product (10¹¹ microgels/hour). The procedure we report enables the manufacture of application-specific, customized bio-suspensions for next-generation therapies and tissue printing/engineering systems that promise to make personalized cell therapeutics and tissue regeneration/organ replacement procedures a reality.