Abstract

There is growing interest in the deposition of microchannels or droplets of cell dispersions to create 3D tissue-like structures that includes living cells.  Many types of cell deposition and support technologies are now employed, and each require appropriate manufacturing equipment, procedures and materials.

 

Digital biomanufacturing orchestrates such concepts as increased monitoring, data handling, control algorithms, machine-learning and process modeling to a new level of process understanding, prediction and control.  The IIoT, Big Data and Cloud technologies insure that the (historical and real-time) data being collected can be employed productively in richer data management, analysis and in silico model generation.  This leads to more rapid process development and cell-supportive environmental control, as well as manufacturing process monitoring, control and automation.

 

Digital biomanufacturing assists in the modeling required to recapitulate the architecture of functional tissues in an organ-on-a chip applications.  It also supports the required modeling and dynamic control of the biofabrication process including the metabolite, factor and environmental maintenance of cell-laden bioinks and nascent developing constructs.