Abstract
The versatility of 3D bioprinting techniques has demonstrated great potential for the development of artificial engineered tissues that more closely resemble native tissues. Despite this, challenges remain as regards the search for new bioinks that embrace all the complex parameters that this technique demands. In an attempt to develop such an advanced material, a novel smart material based on elastin-like recombinamers (ELRs) has been developed by molecularly programming its sequence to exhibit a sequential three-stage gelation process, thus providing printing attributes.The thermoresponsive behavior of the ELR is exploited for the deposition of well-controlled fibres on a platform heated to 37 °C, and its recombinant nature ensures batch-to-batch reproducibility and its applicability to a desired target tissue by the introduction of selected bioactive amino-acid sequences into its molecular chain.The biocompatible nature of the ELR enables the printing of loaded cells while providing a protective environment as part of the printing process. Thus, HFF-1 cells were found to be able to proliferate within the printed structures upon culture, displaying their natural morphology.The results of this work highlight the applicability and novelty of the bioprinting of biomimetic ELR-based structures for advanced applications.
Highlights
Determination of the most suitable bioink is fundamental for the successful production of printed tissue-mimetic structures
If developed for use as bioinks, protein-based materials could demonstrate such exceptional features since proteins already play an important role in a wide variety of tissue specific functions, which endow them with a high complexity
For the first time, we demonstrate the potential use of the Elastin Like Recombinamers (ELRs) as materials to construct resolutive cell-laden tissue matrixes which, in turn, provide an extracellular matrix-like environment sufficient to induce cell proliferation and differentiation
Summary
Determination of the most suitable bioink is fundamental for the successful production of printed tissue-mimetic structures. The strict requirements of the 3D printing technique itself in terms of printability [1], biological parameters [2] and mechanical and structural properties [3] are such that currently used bioinks are limited by their properties, restricting the potential applications of this technique [4]. Given that the majority of used inks have not been designed for 3D bioprinting applications, a genuine breakthrough in the development of new inks would depend on the non-trivial rationality of a new natural biological material that, in turn, can be molecularly designed from scratch in order to comply with the wide variety of parameters that determine its structural, mechanical and biological behavior.
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