Additive Manufacturing-assisted scaffold-based Tissue Engineering

Additive manufacturing (AM) or rapid prototyping (RP) has been widely used for the fabrication of tissue substitute in orthopedic and craniofacial surgeries. The AM techniques are used so as to eliminate the medical complications arising from the use of allografts and autologous tissues. To date, AM methods can be classified into several classes such as melt-dissolution deposition, particle-bonding, indirect and photosensitive techniques. These approaches are commercially available or custom-built AM systems and they have been shown to display micro-scaled features which are advantageous for cell migration, attachment as well as mass transportation of essential nutrients within the tissue engineered construct. In contrast to traditional tissue engineering (TE) approaches, AM-built constructs have significantly improved the cell proliferation rate in the interior of the tissue scaffolds. Modern AM approaches have since emerged as potential TE solutions to construct complex tissues and organs by the inclusion of living cells suspension or growth factor(s) as raw materials into the AM technology. The newly developed AM methods, which are also grouped as bioprinting and organ printing, are still at its infancy as reflected by existing literature. Nevertheless, more innovative AM-related approaches are anticipated in the future and, as suggested by the author, functional CAD-based modeling may possibly be the next state-of-the-art to AM technology.