The safe use of ultrasound in the human body is well established; this adds to the exciting possibility of extending the technology to bioengineering applications.
Acoustic radiation forces associated with ultrasonic standing wave fields (USWFs) have been shown to be capable of spatially organising cells suspended in culture medium into multicellular planar aggregates at areas of minimum pressure, the pressure nodes, and levitating the multicellular aggregates away from the influence of the solid substrate. This project aims to bioengineer 3-D ‘scaffold-free’ neocartilage agglomerates of human articular chondrocytes and skeletal stem cells by application of USWFs in a novel acoustic perfusion bioreactor system.