Dispensing of cells for highly parallel production of living cell microarrays

The growing new field of cell microarrays enables new biomedical assays. We present a unique parallel cell printing technique, which allows the fast production of living cell microarrays. A 24 nozzle printhead was used to spot vital cells in a non-contact manner. We used a cell suspension with 8/spl times/10/sup 7/ cells/ml to generate 100 microarrays containing 24 cell-spots each. Every spot contains between 80 and 100 living cells with extraordinary high survival rates of more than 90% after printing. Compared to other cell printing techniques, we achieved a four times higher cell number per spot and very evenly distributed cells within the spot.