Abstract

Bioprinting: from Regenerative Medicine to the Organ-on-a-Chip

Brian Derby, Professor, University of Manchester

Bioprinting is a poorly defined term that covers many aspects of the use of additive manufacturing technologies to biomedical applications. There has been an extensive literature covering bioprinting in recent years with applications originally in the manufacture of inert porous inserts but now extending to the manufacture of hybrid cell containing microtissue analogues. Bioprinting technologies many different methods of material delivery that have been used including: microextrusion, droplet jetting, stereolithography amongst others. Each technology relies on dramatically different principles of physics and materials chemistry to achieve its desired result. This leads to some techniques being compatible with cell delivery and others limited to materials delivery, with the range of materials compatible with each method also limited by its characteristic features. In addition each technology has a defined range of minimum printable feature size and a characteristic material delivery rate. This presentation will review the range of bioprinting technologies, identify and compare their features and discuss the application areas to which they are best suited.