Integrating melt electrowriting and inkjet bioprinting for engineering structurally organized articular cartilage

Abstract

Successful cartilage engineering requires the generation of biological grafts mimicking the structure, composition and mechanical behaviour of the native tissue. Here melt electrowriting (MEW) was used to produce arrays of polymeric structures whose function was to orient the growth of cellular aggregates spontaneously generated within these structures, and to provide tensile reinforcement to the resulting tissues. Inkjet printing was used to deposit defined numbers of cells into MEW structures, which self-assembled into an organized array of spheroids within hours, ultimately generating a hybrid tissue that was hyaline-like in composition. Structurally, the engineered cartilage mimicked the histotypical organization observed in skeletally immature synovial joints. This biofabrication framework was then used to generate scaled-up (50 mm × 50 mm) cartilage implants containing over 3,500 cellular aggregates in under 15 min. After 8 weeks in culture, a 50-fold increase in the compressive stiffness of these MEW reinforced tissues were observed, while the tensile properties were still dominated by the polymer network, resulting in a composite construct demonstrating tension-compression nonlinearity mimetic of the native tissue. Helium ion microscopy further demonstrated the development of an arcading collagen network within the engineered tissue. This hybrid bioprinting strategy provides a versatile and scalable approach to engineer cartilage biomimetic grafts for biological joint resurfacing.