Bioprinting with live cells

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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-21386-6_3

Tissue engineering is an emerging multidisciplinary field to regenerate damaged or diseased tissues and organs. Traditional tissue engineering strategies involve seeding cells into porous scaffolds to regenerate tissues or organs. However, there are still some challenges such as difficulty in seeding different type of cells spatially into a scaffold, limited oxygen and nutrient delivery and removal of metabolic waste from scaffold and weak cell-adhesion to scaffold material need to be overcome for clinically successful results. Because of those challenges, novel scaffold-free approaches based on cellular self-assembly or three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting have been recently pursued. Bioprinting is a relatively new technology where living cells with or without biomaterials are printed layer-by-layer in order to create 3D living structures. In 3D bioprinting, cell aggregates and hydrogels are termed as bioink used as building blocks that are placed by the bioprinter into precise architecture according to developed computer models. In this chapter, we focus on the scaffold-free, self-assembly based bioprinting approaches and some of the novel developments in this field. This chapter will also discuss the importance as well as the challenges for 3D bioprinting using stem cells. We aim to highlight the importance of the continuous cell printing in order to fabricate 3D biological structures with predefined shapes as being the building blocks of large and complex tissues.