A Hybrid Bioprinting Approach for Scale-Up Tissue Fabrication

Abstract

Tissue engineering has been focused on the fabrication of vascularized 3D tissue for decades. Most recently, bioprinting, especially tissue and organ printing, has shown great potential to enable automated robotic-based fabrication of 3D vascularized tissues and organs that are readily available for in vitro studies or in vivo transplantation. Studies have demonstrated the feasibility of the tissue printing process through bioprinting of scaffold-free cellular constructs that are able to undergo self-assembly for tissue formation; however, they are still limited in size and thickness due to the lack of a vascular network. In this paper, we present a framework concept for bioprinting 3D large-scale tissues with a perfusable vascular system in vitro to preserve cell viability and tissue maturation. With the help of a customized Multi-Arm Bioprinter (MABP), we lay out a hybrid bioprinting system to fabricate scale-up tissues and organ models and demonstrated envision its promising application for in vitro tissue engineering and its potential for therapeutic purposes with our proof of concept study.