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Dear Colleagues,

Millions of people suffer from tissue/organ injuries (e.g., peripheral nerve injuries and heart attacks). Tissue/organ transplantation is the gold standard to treat such injuries but is severely restricted as an option due to the limited availability of donor tissues/organs. Tissue engineering is an emerging field that aims to produce tissue/organ substitutes or scaffolds for implanting into patients, thus providing a permanent solution to treat tissue/organ injuries. Scaffolds made from biodegradable biomaterials play a crucial role in supporting/promoting cell growth and tissue regeneration, as well as transporting nutrients and wastes. One important barrier is the inability to fabricate scaffolds with a microstructure and spatially controlled distribution of cells that mimics the structure and cell organization in native tissues and with both mechanical/biological properties appropriate for tissue engineering applications. Over the past decade, considerable and encouraging progress has been made in the development of bioprinting technologies to create scaffolds, in a layer-by-layer manner, from biomaterials with living cells/growth factors (called “bioink”) for tissue engineering applications. This Special Issue aims at providing a platform to survey and report the recent developments and advancements in this field, which may include, but are not limited to, bioprinting technologies, bioink, design and bioprinting of scaffolds, the scaffold bioprinting process, characterization of scaffolds in vitro and/or in vivo, scaffold-based strategies for TE applications, and/or scaffold-based strategies for cancer therapies.

Prof. Daniel X.B. Chen
Dr. Ning Zhu
Guest Editors

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Keywords

Bioink
Bioprinting
Cancer therapy
Tissue engineering
Tissue regeneration
Tissue scaffolds

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Research

18 pages, 10987 KiB

Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Printability of 3D Printed Hydrogel Scaffolds: Influence of Hydrogel Composition and Printing Parameters

by Saman Naghieh, MD Sarker, N. K. Sharma, Zohra Barhoumi and Xiongbiao Chen

Appl. Sci. 2020, 10(1), 292; https://doi.org/10.3390/app10010292 - 31 Dec 2019

Cited by 77 | Viewed by 9913

Abstract

Extrusion-based bioprinting of hydrogel scaffolds is challenging due to printing-related issues, such as the lack of capability to precisely print or deposit hydrogels onto three-dimensional (3D) scaffolds as designed. Printability is an index to measure the difference between the designed and fabricated scaffold in the printing process, which, however, is still under-explored. While studies have been reported on printing hydrogel scaffolds from one or more hydrogels, there is limited knowledge on the printability of hydrogels and their printing processes. This paper presented our study on the printability of 3D printed hydrogel scaffolds, with a focus on identifying the influence of hydrogel composition and printing parameters/conditions on printability. Using the hydrogels synthesized from pure alginate or alginate with gelatin and methyl-cellulose, we examined their flow behavior and mechanical properties, as well as their influence on printability. To characterize the printability, we examined the pore size, strand diameter, and other dimensions of the printed scaffolds. We then evaluated the printability in terms of pore/strand/angular/printability and irregularity. Our results revealed that the printability could be affected by a number of factors and among them, the most important were those related to the hydrogel composition and printing parameters. This study also presented a framework to evaluate alginate hydrogel printability in a systematic manner, which can be adopted and used in the studies of other hydrogels for bioprinting. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue Bioprinting Scaffolds for Tissue Engineering Applications)

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