Development of a flicking system for producing calcium alginate microbeads

Microencapsulation of cells for various applications is attracting increasing interest. a variety of microencapsulation technology has been developed to produce cells encapsulation. however,previous microencapsulation systems were associated with complex design,high voltage supply,requirements of post cleaning process and large volume of reagents. in this paper,we proposed the development of a flicking device for generating a 3d cell model in calcium alginate microbeads that has potential for pharmacological test and tissue implants. a flicking system based on a flicking device and a syringe pump has been developed for generation of calcium alginate microbeads. the size of the microbeads produced using this system can be controlled by changing the flow rate (5 to 15 µl/min) of the syringe pump and fixing the motor rotation speed of the flicking device at 90 rpm. the calcium alginate microbeads produced using the flicking device were shown to be size controllable (270 to 430 µm) and suitable for microencapsulation. © 2016 penerbit utm press. all rights reserved.