Evaluation of bioprinter technologies

Abstract

Since the first printing of biologics with cytoscribing as demonstrated by Klebe in 1986, three dimensional (3D) bioprinting has made a substantial leap forward, particularly in the last decade. It has been widely used in fabrication of living tissues for various application areas such as tissue engineering and regenerative medicine research, transplantation and clinics, pharmaceutics and high-throughput screening, and cancer research. As bioprinting has gained interest in the medical and pharmaceutical communities, the demand for bioprinters has risen substantially. A myriad of bioprinters have been developed at research institutions worldwide and several companies have emerged to commercialize advanced bioprinter technologies. This paper prefaces the evolution of the field of bioprinting and presents the first comprehensive review of existing bioprinter technologies. Here, a comparative evaluation is performed for bioprinters; limitations with the current bioprinter technologies are discussed thoroughly and future prospects of bioprinters are provided to the reader.

Recent Advances in Bioink Design for 3D Bioprinting of Tissues and Organs

“…3D bioprinting process should be relatively mild and cell friendly as it is required to allow cell printing (Ozbolat et al, 2016, 2017). This requirement limits the number of 3D printing techniques that are suitable for bioprinting (Figure 1).…”

“…SLA could potentially be considered for printing live cells as long as a cell-laden prepolymer formulation is used and the photocuring takes place in a mild, cell friendly condition, which are the two major issues for SLA in bioprinting (Elomaa et al, 2015; Wang et al, 2015; Morris et al, 2017). When 3D printing technologies are considered for bioprinting, the most commonly used technologies are DIW and inkjet printing (Ozbolat et al, 2016, 2017). In addition to these technologies laser-induced forward transfer (LIFT) is also shown to be suitable for bioprinting (Barron et al, 2004a,b; Ringeisen et al, 2004; Hopp et al, 2005; Doraiswamy et al, 2006; Koch et al, 2010).…”

“…Conventional techniques, such as porogen-leaching, injection molding, and electrospinning, are generally recognized as the bottleneck due to limited control over scaffold architecture, composition, pore shape, size, and distribution (Murphy and Atala, 2014; Groen et al, 2016; Shafiee and Atala, 2016). 3D bioprinting enables fabrication of scaffolds, devices, and tissue models with high complexity (Murphy and Atala, 2014; Mandrycky et al, 2016; Ozbolat et al, 2016, 2017; Shafiee and Atala, 2016). 3D printing allows construction of tissues from commonly used medical images (such as X-ray, magnetic resonance imaging, and computerized tomography scan) using computer-aided design.…”

Bioprinting of osteochondral tissues: A perspective on current gaps and future trends

“…Based upon the mechanism of deposition, bioprinting can be defined in three broad categories-extrusion-based bioprinting (EBB), droplet-based bioprinting (DBB), and laser-based bioprinting (LBB)-the detailed mechanisms of which are available at several sources [55,56] . [57][58][59][60][61] .…”

Organ Bioprinting: Are We There Yet?

“…[18,19] Inkjet printing is a noncontact reprographic technique reproducing patterns from the digital data and constructs structures in a layer by layer approach. [11] The bioinks used in inkjet bioprinting include biomaterial scaffolds, living cells, and other biological substances.…”