A Hybrid Bioprinting Approach for Scale Up Tissue Fabrication

Abstract

Tissue engineering has been focused on the fabrication of vascularized 3D tissue for decades. Most recently, bioprinting, especially tissue and organ printing, has shown great potential to enable automated roboticbased fabrication of 3D vascularized tissues and organs that are readily available for in vitro studies or in vivo transplantation. Studies have demonstrated the feasibility of the tissue printing process through bioprinting of scaffoldfree cellular constructs that are able to undergo selfassembly for tissue formation; however, they are still limited in size and thickness due to the lack of a vascular network. In this paper, we present a framework concept for bioprinting 3D largescale tissues with a perfusable vascular system in vitro to preserve cell viability and tissue maturation. With the help of a customized MultiArm Bioprinter (MABP), we lay out a hybrid bioprinting system to fabricate scaleup tissues and organ models and demonstrated envision its promising application for in vitro tissue engineering and its potential for therapeutic purposes with our proof of concept study.