Box holder design for: Ultrasound-stimulated low boiling point phase-change contrast agents for epithelial permeabilization towards ultrasound-mediated gastrointestinal drug delivery
Description
This document and annexed files provide instructions for building a box to hold a 12-well Transwell cell culture plate in alignment with a single element piston transducer. The design to ensure alignment is created in Solidworks, which is then physically built by laser-cutting (printing the different sides that make up the box design) on acrylic sheets and gluing the individual parts together. The bottom section of the box serves as a water bath, and the well plate rests on the wall inserts such that the bottom of the plate is coupled to the water below. Such coupling minimizes acoustic reflections that would occur at the well plate-air interface. Acoustic absorber material can be placed on the bottom of the box to further reduce reflections. We recommend filling the box with water pre-warmed to 37C to minimize cooling of the cells during experimentation. The top of the box consists of a lid whose main purpose is to align the transducer to the center of each well and keep the distance between the transducer face and cells constant. The exact files attached here are designed for a 12-well plate with 12 mm diameter inserts (Costar 3460 Corning Transwell, Corning Inc., Kennebunk, ME, USA) and an 8 mm single element transducer (IP0102HP, Valpey Fisher, Hopkinton, MA, USA), but the design can be easily modified to accommodate well plates and transducers of various sizes. Doing so requires modifying only the lid parts of the box.