Abstract
It is imperative to develop organ manufacturing technologies based on the high organ failure mortality and serious donor shortage problems. As an emerging and promising technology, bioprinting has attracted more and more attention with its super precision, easy reproduction, fast manipulation and advantages in many hot research areas, such as tissue engineering, organ manufacturing, and drug screening. Basically, bioprinting technology consists of inkjet bioprinting, laser-based bioprinting and extrusion-based bioprinting techniques. Biodegradable polymers and stem cells are common printing inks. In the printed constructs, biodegradable polymers are usually used as support scaffolds, while stem cells can be engaged to differentiate into different cell/tissue types. The integration of biodegradable polymers and stem cells with the bioprinting techniques has provided huge opportunities for modern science and technologies, including tissue repair, organ transplantation and energy metabolism.
Highlights
On the basis of statistical data, there were 25.7 million adults and 75,000 children suffering from cancer of stomach, liver, breast, lung, and so on during 1995–2009 [1]
More and more evidence has shown that stem cells are the building blocks or backbones for regenerative medicine with their unique functions and advantages of self-renewal, high proliferation, and multiple-directional differentiation abilities [7,8]
Based on the working principles, bioprinting technologies have been divided into four classes: inkjet bioprinting, extrusion bioprinting, laser-assisted bioprinting, and ultrasonic bioprinting (Figure 1) [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
Summary
On the basis of statistical data, there were 25.7 million adults and 75,000 children suffering from cancer of stomach, liver, breast, lung, and so on during 1995–2009 [1]. For the shortcomings and limitations of the surgical transplantation, scientists have tried various new methods to increase man’s life span These new methods include biomaterial induction, cell therapy, tissue engineering and organ manufacturing approaches [3,4,5,6]. Excelling at tissue engineering, bioprinting can create customized structures with the computer-aided models (CAD) quickly, and print cells, cytokines, or ECMs automatically and precisely. This technology has been regarded as a forward-looking method to assemble cells and biomaterials rapidly and precisely [19,20,21,22]. Cells, as “bio-inks”, are mixed in biodegradable polymer hydrogels before being printed [9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16]
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