Effects of Various Sterilization Treatments on Polydimethylsiloxane Micropillars for Artificial Skeletal Muscle Contractility Measurement

In recent years, it has been difficult to conduct animal experiments for drug discovery and research. This is due to the ethical issues and high cost of animal testing. Our research group has developed a culture platform capable of quantifying the contractile force of artificial skeletal muscle as an alternative to animal experiments and proposed a method for evaluating drug efficacy based on contractile force response. The contractility evaluation utilizes the displacement and spring constant of the PDMS micropillar attracted by the contraction of the Artificial skeletal muscle. Therefore, changes in the spring constant, i.e., changes in the elastic modulus of PDMS greatly affect the accuracy of the measurement. Although it is known that various sterilization hardens PDMS, there are few studies that have specifically evaluated the effects of sterilization. In this study, we developed a system for measuring the spring constant of PDMS micropillars and investigated the impact of various sterilization-induced crosslinking on the mechanical stiffness of PDMS micropillars.