Opinion
Bioprinting scale-up tissue and organ constructs for transplantation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2015.04.005Get rights and content

Highlights

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    This paper presents recent approaches in bioprinting scale-up tissues and organs.

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    Vascularized tissue and organ construct bioprinting techniques are demonstrated.

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    In situ bioprinting along with its translational potential are highlighted.

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    Major roadblocks are discussed, and future strategies are presented.

Bioprinting is an emerging field that is having a revolutionary impact on the medical sciences. It offers great precision for the spatial placement of cells, proteins, genes, drugs, and biologically active particles to better guide tissue generation and formation. This emerging biotechnology appears to be promising for advancing tissue engineering toward functional tissue and organ fabrication for transplantation, drug testing, research investigations, and cancer or disease modeling, and has recently attracted growing interest worldwide among researchers and the general public. In this Opinion, I highlight possibilities for the bioprinting scale-up of functional tissue and organ constructs for transplantation and provide the reader with alternative approaches, their limitations, and promising directions for new research prospects.

Section snippets

Bioprinting: a promising technology to revolutionize medicine

Bioprinting can be defined as the spatial patterning of living cells and other biologics by stacking and assembling them using a computer-aided layer-by-layer deposition approach to develop living tissue and organ analogs for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, pharmacokinetic, and other biological studies [1]. It uses four approaches to deposit living cells: inkjet [2], extrusion [3], acoustic [4] and laser [5] based. Given its great benefit in spatially arranging multiple cell types to

Bioprinting of vascularized tissue and organ constructs in vitro

Organ bioprinting holds great promise for the future, but whole-organ bioprinting has remained elusive due to several limitations associated with biology, bioprinting technology, bioink material, and the post-bioprinting maturation process [9]. The bioprinting of functional tissues is an intermediate stage toward achieving organ-level complexity. In vitro fabrication of functional tissues is a sophisticated phenomenon comprising a hierarchical arrangement of multiple cell types, including a

From in vitro to in situ: regenerating tissues through direct bioprinting into defect sites

Bioprinting living tissue constructs or cell laden scaffolds in vitro has been well studied, and thin tissues or tissues that do not need vascularization, including skin, cartilage, and blood vessels, have been grown [12]. However, in situ bioprinting can enable the growth of thick tissues in critical defects with the help of vascularization driven by nature in lesions. Therefore, it is a promising direction for the bioprinting of porous tissue analogs that can engraft with endogenous tissue

Concluding remarks

Here, I present the state of the art in bioprinting technology for biofabrication of scale-up tissue and organ constructs. Two approaches are discussed: (i) in vitro bioprinting of tissue and organ constructs with a focus on alternative technologies in bioprinting a multiscale vascular network in tandem with the rest of the tissue construct, and (ii) in situ bioprinting of tissue construct for regeneration of large defects that will one day enable the repair of body parts directly in patients

Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by National Science Foundation Awards CMMI 1462232, CAREER 1349716, Diabetes in Action Research and Education Foundation, and the Grow Iowa Values Funds. The author would like to express his gratitude to G. Dai, Christopher Barnatt, Yin Yu, and Kerim Moncal for providing some of the high-quality images in the figures.

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