Abstract
There is a growing demand for alternative fabrication approaches to develop tissues and organs as conventional techniques are not capable of fabricating constructs with required structural, mechanical, and biological complexity. 3D bioprinting offers great potential to fabricate highly complex constructs with precise control of structure, mechanics, and biological matter [i.e., cells and extracellular matrix (ECM) components]. 3D bioprinting is an additive manufacturing approach that utilizes a “bioink” to fabricate devices and scaffolds in a layer-by-layer manner. 3D bioprinting allows printing of a cell suspension into a tissue construct with or without a scaffold support. The most common bioinks are cell-laden hydrogels, decellulerized ECM-based solutions, and cell suspensions. In this mini review, a brief description and comparison of the bioprinting methods, including extrusion-based, droplet-based, and laser-based bioprinting, with particular focus on bioink design requirements are presented. We also present the current state of the art in bioink design including the challenges and future directions.
Highlights
Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field currently focused on two major areas: (i) developing new methods to repair, regenerate, and replace damaged tissues and organs and (ii) creating in vitro tissue models to better understand tissue development, disease development, and progression and to develop and screen drugs (Langer and Vacanti, 1993; Griffith and Naughton, 2002; Benam et al, 2015; Tibbitt et al, 2015; Nguyen et al, 2016; Zhang et al, 2016)
There is a significant interest in designing novel bioink formulations toward the goal of achieving the “ideal” bioink for each bioprinting technology (Hölzl et al., 2016)
Cell-laden hydrogels are the most common bioinks, offering novel strategies including multi-material printing, shear-thinning capability, and sequential cross-linking toward self-supporting constructs. dECM-based bioinks provide an alternative approach utilizing decellulerized tissues, yet the processing of decellulerized tissue increases the cost of the bioinks
Summary
Tissue engineering is a multidisciplinary field currently focused on two major areas: (i) developing new methods to repair, regenerate, and replace damaged tissues and organs and (ii) creating in vitro tissue models to better understand tissue development, disease development, and progression and to develop and screen drugs (Langer and Vacanti, 1993; Griffith and Naughton, 2002; Benam et al, 2015; Tibbitt et al, 2015; Nguyen et al, 2016; Zhang et al, 2016). 3D printing has a strong potential to become a common fabrication technique in medicine as it enables fabrication of modular and patient-specific scaffolds and devices, and tissue models, with high structural complexity and design flexibility (Murphy and Atala, 2014; Jang et al., 2016a,b,c; Kang et al., 2016; Kuo et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2016).
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