Creation of a vascular system for organ manufacturing

Abstract

The creation of a vascular system is considered to be the main object for complex organ manufacturing. In this short review, we demonstrate two approaches to generate a branched vascular system which can be printed using rapid prototyping or bioprinting techniques. One approach is constructing mathematical tree models on the basis of human physiological characteristics and calculating the model using constrained constructive optimization to obtain three-dimensional (3D) geometrical structures. The rules of the branching of the vessel tree were extracted from the literature. Another approach is using computer-aided design models to build a multi-scale vascular network including arteries, veins, and capillaries. A 3D vascular template with both synthetic scaffold polymer and cell/hydrogel was created in our group, using a double-nozzle, low-temperature deposition technique. Each of the approaches holds promise in producing a vascular system.