ORIGAMI-INSPIRED CULTURE DEVICE FOR MECHANICAL FOLDING STIMULATION OF SKIN TISSUE EQUIVALENT

Skin, being a barrier between the human body and the outside world, experiences a variety of stimuli, including rubbing, stretching, and folding. In this work, we propose the design of a device that uses an origami-inspired substrate to transform compressive motion into folding and allows culturing full-thickness skin equivalents under repetitive folding stimuli. The substrate was designed with uniformly distributed holes to facilitate the skin equivalent formation and prevent the skin equivalent from detaching during the repetitive folding motion. Our results show that folding culture of the skin equivalent resulted in the thick and differentiated epidermal layer. Taken together, we believe that this folding culture device will be a useful tool for studying mechanobiology of cultured skin models.