A Demonstration of Bioprinting Thick Tissue that Incorporates Small-Scale Vasculature

3-D bioprinting is a form of rapid prototyping adapted to the tissue engineering industry. Printers assemble tissues from ink containing cells and supporting materials of various types. Given a suitable recipe, the result is a functional tissue quite close to the real thing in structure and function. The interesting part of this open access paper is not that the team bioprinted small-scale model hearts as their proof of concept, given that these are not fully functional heart tissues capable of the electrical coordination required to exhibit a heart beat, and nor is it that they used materials personalized to a specific patient. Rather, it is that they demonstrate the ability to bioprint networks of small blood vessels sufficient to support the interior cells of a thick tissue. This is an important advance, even given that it is not the full microvascular networks of capillaries found in natural tissue. This matter of blood vessels is a major challenge in the tissue engineering community. Cells need a supply of blood in order to survive, and that supply must be carried by blood vessels for any distance much over a millimeter. Finding a reliable way to incorporate blood vessel networks into tissues is the primary roadblock holding back construction of replacement organs, and it is why so much work today is focused on the production of tiny, thin organoid tissue sections. Generation of thick vascularized tissues that fully match the patient still remains an unm...
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