Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Ophthalmology, 3D Bioprinting Core, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, USA.
J Cell Mol Med. 2018 Jun;22(6):2964-2969. doi: 10.1111/jcmm.13598. Epub 2018 Mar 13.
Biofabrication of tissue analogues is aspiring to become a disruptive technology capable to solve standing biomedical problems, from generation of improved tissue models for drug testing to alleviation of the shortage of organs for transplantation. Arguably, the most powerful tool of this revolution is bioprinting, understood as the assembling of cells with biomaterials in three-dimensional structures. It is less appreciated, however, that bioprinting is not a uniform methodology, but comprises a variety of approaches. These can be broadly classified in two categories, based on the use or not of supporting biomaterials (known as "scaffolds," usually printable hydrogels also called "bioinks"). Importantly, several limitations of scaffold-dependent bioprinting can be avoided by the "scaffold-free" methods. In this overview, we comparatively present these approaches and highlight the rapidly evolving scaffold-free bioprinting, as applied to cardiovascular tissue engineering.
组织类似物的生物制造正有望成为一种颠覆性技术，能够解决许多现有的生物医学问题，从生成用于药物测试的改良组织模型到缓解移植器官短缺的问题。可以说，这场革命最有力的工具是生物打印，它被理解为将细胞与生物材料组装成三维结构。然而，人们对生物打印并不都是持赞赏态度的，因为它并不是一种统一的方法，而是包含了多种方法。这些方法可以根据是否使用支持生物材料（称为“支架”，通常是可打印的水凝胶，也称为“生物墨水”）来进行大致分类。重要的是，通过“无支架”方法可以避免支架依赖性生物打印的一些局限性。在这篇综述中，我们比较了这些方法，并重点介绍了快速发展的无支架生物打印技术在心血管组织工程中的应用。
