Flow-driven vascularization in soft frangible materials

Vascularization, the formation of a branched network of vessels, enables the transport of nutrients and removal of wastes in biological organisms. In plants and animals, vascularization is self-organized in response to biochemical and biophysical cues. However, in synthetic organ systems, one of the main challenges in scaling up organoids has been proper vascularization of the tissues. Here, we use flow induced channelization in a crosslinkable gel to enable the controlled formation of synthetic vasculature in soft frangible tissue-like materials. This allows us to control and guide the formation of both divergent and convergent channel patterns, hierarchical formation of thick and thin capillaries, all the while being space-filling. We rationalize our results using a theoretical framework.