Multimaterial and Multiscale Rapid Prototyping of Patient-Specific Scaffold

Abstract

The majority of strategies used in tissue engineering (TE) employ a scaffold, which is used to guide .the proliferation, the migration and the adhesione of cell in 3D to pruduce an engineered tissue. A new trend in scaffolds’s fabrication is represented by the hybrid Rapid Prototyping technologies. This is a new multimaterial and multiscale fabrication approach which combine the common RP technologies with other micro/nanofabrication techiques to fabricate scaffold that mimick the hetereogenty and hierarchical structure typical of the native extracellular matrix. In this new contest our work present: 1) an innovative device for the fabrication of multi material scaffolds based on an open source FDM 3D printer suitably modified to integrate a multi nozzle deposition tool 2) a design proposal for a multi material and multi scale machine to allow a full control over the modulation of the building materials and of the topography in a scaffold 3) and lastly a CAD workflow to guide the fabrication of RP patient specific scaffolds. Multifunctional hydrogel-based scaffold are fabricated as a demonstration of the validity of the proposed devices. Starting from a clinical case we print a patient-specific scaffold with the aim to recover bone defects at mandibular level as a validation of the proposed CAD process.