The evolution of cell printing

Abstract

Tissue and organs are highly complex systems with innate heterogeneous components, each with their own structure and function. Many facets of this structure have micron-scale features (e.g., capillaries, sinuses, cell-cell contacts, extracellular matrix). Traditional approaches in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine attempt to recreate this structure and function in vitro by randomly seeding cells onto 3D scaffolds. These 3D scaffolds provide the structure and an environment for seeded cells to differentiate into tissue-like materials [17, 67, 82]. The structure and function of natural tissue is replicated by using either multifunction stem cells (e.g., pluripotent, mesenchymal, embryonic) or highly sophisticated scaffolds (e.g., micro-/nanostructured, chemically/biologically functionalized), or both [14, 24, 36, 37, 41-43, 49, 52, 71, 78, 89]. There are tissue-engineering success stories, but most are for simple, homogeneous systems such as skin and thin membrane (bladder) replacements. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.