Bioprinting
What is Bioprinting?
Bioprinting is a technique for manufacturing living tissues and organs. This method combines cells, growth factors, and biomaterials to fabricate 3D living structures that closely mimics the natural tissues. Usually, the biomaterial acts as a support in which cells can grow and produce their own extracellular matrix.
What is Bioprinting?
Bioprinting process is similar to conventional 3D printing. The most important difference is that bioprinters use bioink, which includes living cells, to build complex tissue-like structures, e.g skin. The instructions for the bioprinter comes from a digital model that is loaded into the bioprinter software. The model can be obtained from a computed tomography (CT) or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan from a patient or simply designed by the user. Then, the cells that could be also isolated from the patient, are mixed with a polymer matrix, which is then loaded into the printer head to initiate the actual printing process. Another difference with the conventional 3D printing process is the post-processing. The printed tissue has to be placed into an incubator and sometimes in bioreactors to stimulate cell activity.
Learn more about the different type of printing techniques →
Bioprinting
Extrussion-based bioprinting
Relies on extrusion of bioinks in the form of viscous solutions or dispersions. Bioinks are extruded using pneumatic, plunger or screw-based pressure through microneedle onto substrate or plate.
Inkjet-based bioprinting
Inkjet-based bioprinting is achieved through a non-contact process by depositing microsized bioink droplets onto a substrate.
Stereolithography
Based on the deposition of biomaterials onto a
substrate using a laser as the energy source.
Digital light processing
This type of 3D printing technology is similar to the stereolithography (SLA). The key difference is that it can achieve faster print times compared to SLA, since it uses a digital light projector to flash the entire area of each layer at once.
Bioprinting with patients in mind
Why bioprinting matters?
The shortage of transplant organs is a worldwide problem. In fact, the World Health Organisation reported that one person is added to the transplant waiting list every 5 minutes, and around 20 people die every day while waiting for a transplant. Waiting lists for transplant organs can span several years and even decades, which prompts the scientists to turn towards emerging technologies for help against this worldwide issue. 3D bioprinting is at the heart of many of these technologies.
Built on the principles of 3D printing, bioprinting relies on depositing bioink to print living tissues layer-by-layer. We believe that, by putting our combined expertise to the service of humanity, there would be no need to rely on donor organs in the near future, and anyone needing a transplant would receive a personalized organ grown in the lab from their own cells.
Bioprinting holds the promise to solve the shortage of human organs and boost personalized medicine.