Printability assessment of modified filament deposition modelling three dimensional bioprinter printer using polymeric formulations

Abstract

Three dimensional (3D) bioprinting is a rapid prototyping technology that can be used to accurately position living cells and biomaterials called bioink, to fabricate functional living tissue constructs or organs. The bioink are deposited in 3D in a layer-by-layer manner using a bioprinter. However, commercially available 3D bioprinters are expensive, limiting the widespread adoption of this technology in low-resource laboratories. To overcome this limitation the conventional Filament Deposition Modelling (FDM) 3D printer can be modified to a 3D bioprinter by replacing the print head unit. During the makeover, The device has to perform in its most efficient capacity in synergy with the bioink used. Hence it is essential to check the bio-printabililty of bioink in the modified FDM printer. In this study we created certain specific G-codes for the evaluation of hybrid bioinks and authenticated the printability. This study focuses on quantifying the printability of a hybrid hydrogel composed of sodium salt carboxymethyl cellulose (CMC) and gelatin using a 3D bioprinter based on the RepRap prototyper. The 3D design and slicing parameters were generated using opensource software and manually edited for printability evaluation. The results of these experiments indicate the importance of printability evaluation of custom bioprinters and provide some key aspects of how to modify CAD design parameters for printability evaluation. This approach can also be adopted to evaluate the printability of other hydrogels for bio-printing. The codes are created to evaluate the printability of bioink using FDM modified bioprinters. The printability evaluation is limited to high viscous bioink for extrusion bioprinting. A user friendly, simple G-Codes and methodology for evaluation of printability of bioink using FDM modified bioprinters. To authors knowledge, this is the first report on 3D printability evaluation of bioink using FDM modified bioprinters. The study also fulfills an identified need to study printability of bioink in biofabrication by additive manufacturing.