Rapid thermoforming of polycarbonate cell culture accessories from 3D printed molds

Bespoke cell culture devices are essential for tissue engineering applications. Traditional manufacturing methods for cell culture accessories involve injection molding and machining, which are too costly and time-consuming to implement for producing custom designs in small batches, and/or while testing the usefulness of a new design before mass producing it. Materials typically used for rapid design iteration, like poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) elastomers, surmount this issue but present new challenges of affinity for hydrophobic small molecules and sub-optimal interactions with sensitive cell types. Here, we propose polycarbonate (PC) thermoforming as a solution for creating customized transparent and autoclavable accessories. We demonstrate that optimized preheating of PC overcomes issues with bubbling during thermoforming. The use of high heat deflection temperature (HDT) resins allows these PC devices to be thermoformed off molds created by Digital Light Processing (DLP) 3D prints, enabling rapid prototyping of the PC. Using this approach, we fabricated custom PC well plate inserts. These inserts combine many advantages of tissue culture polystyrene (negligible absorption of hydrophobic molecules, transparency, rigidity) and elastomers (ease of creating bespoke devices, ability to be sterilized by autoclaving) and are compatible with a variety of cell biology applications, including human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC) culture. PC inserts also supported iPSC differentiation into cardiomyocytes (iPS-CM) and micro-patterning of iPS-CM into cardiospheres. This low cost, customizable approach holds promise for a variety of bioengineering applications.