Abstract
The production of patient-specific bone substitutes with an exact fit through 3D printing is emerging as an alternative to autologous bone grafting. To the success of tissue regeneration, the material characteristics such as porosity, stiffness, and surface topography have a strong influence on the cell–material interaction and require significant attention. Printing a soft hydrocolloid-based hydrogel reinforced with irregularly-shaped microporous biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) particles (150–500 µm) is an alternative strategy for the acquisition of a complex network with good mechanical properties that could fulfill the needs of cell proliferation and regeneration. Three well-known hydrocolloids (sodium alginate, xanthan gum, and gelatin) have been combined with BCP particles to generate stable, homogenous, and printable solid dispersions. Through rheological assessment, it was determined that the crosslinking time, printing process parameters (infill density percentage and infill pattern), as well as BCP particle size and concentration all influence the stiffness of the printed matrices. Additionally, the swelling behavior on fresh and dehydrated 3D-printed structures was investigated, where it was observed that the BCP particle characteristics influenced the constructs’ water absorption, particle diffusion out of the matrix and degradability.
Highlights
The working principle of 3D printing is that objects can be created by adding material in a layer-by-layer manner via automated deposition and computer-aided design/computeraided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems
The observation of the biphasic calcium phosphate (BCP) granules revealed irregularly shaped particles with high microporosity and size ranges of 150–250 μm for BCP1 granules and 150–500 μm for
A biocompatible colloidal system was designed for the purpose of loading BCP granules and controlling the rheological properties to ensure
Summary
The working principle of 3D printing is that objects can be created by adding material in a layer-by-layer manner via automated deposition and computer-aided design/computeraided manufacturing (CAD/CAM) systems. As a replacement to autografts, synthetic bone graft biomaterials are available in unlimited quantities and have the advantage of being sterile and do not carry a risk of disease transfer. They have the added benefit of eliminating the need for invasive harvesting of autologous bone, which can lead to donor-site morbidity [4,5,6]. Considerable work has been done in developing functional ceramic inks and bioinks, i.e., biological cocktails of ceramic materials, cells, growth factors or drugs, among others, many extrudable combinations are only capable of printing simple structures that are only a few millimeters tall due to limitations in flow characteristics [8,9]. More promising results in precisely replicating centimeter-scale bone segments have been obtained with ready-to-use commercial pastes [3,10,11] or formulations loaded with small (
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