Abstract

Bioprinting: The Present and the Outlook for the Field

Gabor Forgacs, Professor, University of Missouri-Columbia; Founder, Modern Meadow

Bioprinting is a young, highly interdisciplinary field. Its modern era commenced in 2000 with the work of Thomas Boland and his re-engineered Hewlett Packard desktop inkjet printer. Since then a number of other technologies have been developed utilizing extrusion, acoustic waves, laser assisted delivery and lately “liquid bioprinting”. The field has also matured from its purely academic roots into successful commercial ventures. Meanwhile the initial hype surrounding the field has substantially subsided even if not fully disappeared.  Long are the days when bioprinting has been hailed as a panacea for the chronic donor organ shortage, a method capable to replace dysfunctional tissue structures. At present it is mostly applied to the fabrication of sophisticated scaffold structures for tissue engineering and relatively small anatomically and physiologically relevant tissue constructs for drug development and testing and disease modeling.  Overall, bioprinting has seen spectacular progress in the past 17 years and a number of market analyses have predicted a bright future for the field. I will provide a hype-free overview of the technology, where it stands today, what it has specifically accomplished and what can be expected in the years to come.