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

Standard cell-culture ware is mass-produced in fixed designs, whereas many tissue-engineering workflows require custom inserts, lids, chambers, or patterned substrates, especially during early-stage research and method development. Conventional fabrication 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 production. 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, staining chambers and other custom accessories. We next validated the cytocompatibility of these devices by demonstrating culture and cardiomyocyte differentiation of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSC). Finally, we demonstrated the utility of thermoformed PC for creating 3D engineered tissues (cardiospheres). These results establish DLP-assisted PC thermoforming as a rapid, low-cost workflow for fabricating transparent, autoclavable, user-defined cell-culture accessories during prototyping and small-batch bioengineering applications.