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. 2022 Apr 18;9(21):2105909. doi: 10.1002/advs.202105909

Figure 1.

Figure 1

The miniJoint—a miniature system mimicking the knee joint in the human body. a) The miniJoint chip comprises engineered adipose tissues (AT), synovial‐like fibrous tissues (SFT), osteochondral tissues (OC) to simulate fat tissue, synovium, and cartilage‐bone complex in the native knee joint. Crosstalk between tissues was realized via either diffusion (within OC) or fluidic flow. b) The microtissue modules were generated by photo‐crosslinking hBMSC‐laden GelMA placed in 3D printed inserts. c,d) The miniJoint chip was established by integrating differentiated microtissues in a 3D printed chamber c), and then perfusing tissue‐specific medium (AM, FM, and OM; yellow, pink, and blue) streams on the top and a commonly shared medium (SM; purple) stream simulating the function of synovial fluid at the bottom d). A photograph of an assembled miniJoint chip is shown in e). f) Timeline (up to day 63) of generating miniJoint culture and modeling joint disease. g) A high‐yield miniJoint chip capable of producing four replicates of each microtissue. hBMSC, human bone marrow‐derived mesenchymal stem cell; GelMA, methacrylated gelatin; AM, adipogenic medium; FM, fibrogenic medium; OM, osteogenic medium.