Abstract

3D biomimetic printing for soft tissue repair

Jerry Fuh, Professor, National University of Singapore

With the advance of 3D Printing (3DP) technologies in the past 20 years, bio-printing has been increasingly accepted by clinicians and academia for possible use in tissue engineering applications. But the most successful biomedical applications still lie on printing of intricate medical models for surgery planning. Printing of scaffolds, organs and layers of living cells onto a gel medium or sugar matrix and slowly building up to form 3D structures aiming for tissue repair is still been challenging by many clinicians and doctors and thus facing difficulties especially for new FDA-approved medical procedures. 3D printing technologies applied to develop viable and prosthetic replacement tissues and implants for human clinical applications will be an exciting and new area of biomedical research and development in the next decade. In this talk, the promising bio-printing techniques based on the Drop-on-demand (DoD) and electro-hydrodynamic jetting (E-jetting) developed at NUS aim to create more bioactive functionally-graded coating for implants and biomimetic 3D scaffolding for soft tissue repair/re-generation will be introduced. Case examples on meniscus, cartilage, tendon and dentin tissue repair will also be discussed.