Bioprinting: application of additive manufacturing in medicine

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The main goal of tissue or organ engineering is to reconstruct a damaged or diseased tissue or organ with cells, biomaterials and bioactive molecules. Recently, many tissue engineering approaches are based on developing highly porous tissue scaffolds and seeding cells into the scaffold with or without biologically active molecules to reinstate damaged tissue or organ. Various additive manufacturing methods have been used successfully to develop scaffolds with controlled micro-architecture and geometry. However, scaffold-based approaches still face some challenges such as difficulty in seeding different cells spatially in a scaffold, limited vascularization and blood-vessel formation, and weak cell-adhesion to scaffold material. This chapter focuses on Bioprinting, a special additive manufacturing technique, for tissue/organ engineering. Bioprinting or biofabrication creates complex living and non-living biological products from living cells, biomolecules and biomaterials. Various bioprinting techniques are discussed and contrasted in this chapter.