Bioprinting is applying additive manufacturing to biology. Bioprinting has evolved from the placement of cells in a traditional inkjet printer to complex systems composed of high-end 3D printing methods and sophisticated cell-laden bioactive materials to engineer tissues that recapitulate human physiology. Research progress has been tremendous in areas such as drug development and regenerative medicine as various groups work on pushing the boundaries of what is possible with this platform.
One of the key uses of bioprinting is creating advanced tissue models that reproduce human physiology or pathology for the development of novel therapeutics. The investment required to discover, test and approve a new drug is estimated to range from $314 million to $2.8 billion. Bioprinting has emerged as a promising method to create more functional and predictive preclinical models to help deliver new drugs with less investment.
We have seen the first published tumor-on-a-chip system. It combines a blood and lymphatic vessel pair that models in a better way the delivery, as well as drainage of anticancer drugs. This is a revolutionary step in modeling human complexity to identify more quickly drugs that will fail—instead of letting rates of clinical trial success remain at 10 percent because too many useless drugs are passed to clinical trials.
Another key use of bioprinting is regenerative medicine. Since the inception of tissue engineering research, the scientific community has dreamt of when we would be able to 3D bioprint tissues and organs to implant in humans. Decades later, this challenge remains. Vascularization is a significant limitation of traditional tissue engineering that can be solved using high-resolution bioprinting. Light-based platforms have successfully demonstrated creating vessels that enable gas exchange and blood oxygenation, functions that are key for tissue survival. For example, 3D Systems has leveraged these technologies through a partnership with United Therapeutics in an effort to bioprint human lungs. This work has led to the development of the revolutionary Print-to-Perfusion process, which has shown promise to enable levels of vascularization not achievable through traditional biofabrication methods.
3D bioprinting has also expanded into unconventional uses. One project attempts to address the limitation of oxygen supply in engineered tissues by incorporating plant cells into the bioinks that can be co-bioprinted with human cells. This creates the environment needed for tissue oxygenation. Plant cells can then be selectively removed from the tissue constructs prior to final usage, also enabling vascularization to occur with the leftover perfusable microchannel networks. Moreover, a cryobioprinting method using proprietary bioink formulations has been reported to enable simultaneous bioprinting and cryopreservation of tissue constructs. This in turn improves tissue shelf-life for use in production settings. Additional interesting application scenarios of 3D bioprinting that are being increasingly investigated include, but are not limited to, those applied to food engineering and space research.
Over the last two decades or so, the field of 3D bioprinting has seen tremendous advances. These span from new hardware and software configurations, such as expanded types of bioprinting methods and enhanced digital controls, to bioinks that have been significantly enriched with numerous downstream translational applications in various areas.
Yet, we see continuing possibilities in further improving the 3D bioprinting technologies—primarily from three perspectives.
First lies in the potential merging of the different techniques. Each bioprinting modality has its unique advantages and limitations. Integrating two or more modalities into a single one may lead to extended capacities than each of them separately can attain. Synergy is possible.
Second, combining it with artificial intelligence has the potential to make bioprinting more automated and precise.
Third, and finally, miniaturization of 3D bioprinting methods to fit into minimally invasive surgical strategies will make it possible to conduct patient-specific intraoperative procedures. This will enable more rapid outcomes in areas such as wound healing.
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