Biocompatibility analysis of thermal and UV-curable polydimethylsiloxane for semi blood vessel-like model fabrication

Micro-channels of different geometries have been used to simulate blood capillaries as well as bigger vessels such as coronaries [1] , [2] . Some of the authors have reported the fabrication of blood vessel-like model by a combination of laser ablation technique and soft-lithography to obtain a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) device fully covered by that remain after flow assays [2] . In the manufacturing process laser based, most of the time is spent in the human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs)replication of vessel-like with PDMS, being this fact the limiting factor for large scale production. To reduce the fabrication time an alternative could be the use of UV-curable polymers developed for fabricating multiscale, hierarchical structures for the manufacturing of biomedical, and micro/nanofluidic devices [3] . In this work a comparison between the biocompatibility of UV-curable PDMS (KER 4690 A/B (Shin-Etsu Silicones Europe B.V.)) and the thermal curable PDMS (Sylgard 184: Dow Corning Michigan, USA) is presented.