3D Bioprinting

3.2. Bioink Materials

Two major types of bioink materials have been used in bioprinting of 3D tissue and organ constructs (Ozbolat, 2015a). The first and most common one is scaffold-based bioink where cells are loaded in hydrogels or similar exogenous materials and bioprinted into 3D constructs. Cell-laden hydrogels allow cell proliferation and growth and facilitate formation of tissue. In the second type of bioink, cells are bioprinted without the use of an exogenous biomaterial, in a scaffold-free process mimicking embryonic development. Cells are first formed into neotissues that are engineered for bioprinting processes; resulting neotissues are then deposited in specific patterns where they fuse and mature for fabrication of larger scale functional ...