3D printing in tissue engineering

Abstract

3D printing is making a tremendous impact in many fields, including the biomedical field. The biomedical application of 3D printing technologies spans from producing biomimicking models for surgical planning, making patient-specific high-performance implants, constructing porous functional scaffolds for tissue engineering, to medical frontiers such as creating living cancer models. Great efforts of employing various 3D printing techniques to obtain really usable tissue engineering scaffolds are being made by many research groups around the world but there are still many challenges in this area. On one hand, better, or technique-specific, materials need to be developed for creating novel scaffolds for targeted tissues. On the other hand, current general 3D printing techniques have limitations for their biomedical applications and hence newer and better 3D printing techniques need to be investigated and developed. For example, the technique should be able to handle growth factors and/or cells for their incorporation in advanced scaffolds. For bone tissue engineering, we have developed new composites for constructing porous scaffolds and new 3D printing techniques (such as low-temperature printing) for making growth factor and/or cell incorporated scaffolds. This talk will give an overview of 3D printing and its application in tissue engineering. It will introduce our work in this area and focus on the 3D printing technologies that we have developed for producing multifunctional tissue engineering scaffolds. Particular attention will be paid to formulating suitable “inks” for 3D printing, which is critical in biomedical 3D printing. Our latest work in 4D printing will also be introduced.