Abstract
Nanocellulosic materials, such as cellulose nanocrystals, cellulose nanofibers, and bacterial nanocellulose, that display high surface area, mechanical strength, biodegradability, and tunable surface chemistry have attracted great attention over the last decade for biomedical applications. Simultaneously, 3D printing is revolutionizing the field of biomedical engineering, which enables the fast and on-demand printing of customizable scaffolds, tissues, and organs. Nanocellulosic materials hold tremendous potential for 3D bioprinting due to their printability, their shear thinning behavior, their ability to live cell support and owing to their excellent biocompatibility. The amalgamation of nanocellulose-based feedstocks and 3D bioprinting is therefore of critical interest for the development of advanced functional 3D hydrogels. In this context, this review briefly discusses the most recent key developments and challenges in 3D bioprinting nanocellulose-based hydrogel constructs that have been successfully tested for mammalian cell viability and used in tissue engineering applications.
Highlights
Hydrogels are three-dimensional (3D) networks of crosslinked hydrophilic polymer chains, which are capable of imbibing large quantities of water [1]
Cytocompatibility tests demonstrated that the fabricated scaffolds supported human printed from 1cells wt %proliferation, cellulose nanofibrils or nanofibers (CNFs) ink, and which the mechanical strength the 3D-printed hydrogels tunable dermal fibroblast improved with of increasing scaffold rigiditywas
Cytocompatibility tests demonstrated that the fabricated scaffolds there is a paucity of reports available on successful 3D printing and mammalian cell viability tests on supported human dermal fibroblast cells proliferation, which improved with increasing scaffold stable pristine CNC and bacterial nanocellulose (BNC) hydrogels
Summary
Hydrogels are three-dimensional (3D) networks of crosslinked hydrophilic polymer chains, which are capable of imbibing large quantities of water [1]. Intermolecular hydrogen bonds between hydroxyl and oxygen groups of adjacent molecules; and van der Waals forces promote parallel stacking of multiple cellulose chains, forming stable elementary fibrils with high axial stiffness that further aggregate into larger microfibrils (5–50 nm in diameter and several microns in length), as shown in Figure 1 [3,4,5]. These cellulose fibrils consist of highly ordered (crystalline) and disordered (amorphous-like) regions that are the main reinforcement segment for plants, trees, algae, and some marine creatures and bacteria [3].
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