Micropatterning polyvinyl alcohol as a biomimetic material through soft lithography with cell culture

Integrating inorganic materials with specific biological systems requires a complex set of properties that can mimic physiological function to create microchip devices. Several factors in the material including the spatial location of the cellular attachment heavily influence the control of this functionality and must be dictated to parallel in vivo characteristics. In this work, we demonstrate polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) for use in emulating these properties to produce a highly robust and functional biomaterial as a microchip. We show the utility of PVA for cellular patterning using soft lithography. Based on these results, PVA can be applied in a diversity of areas including tissue engineering, biomimetics, and cellular micropatterning.