Bioprinting for organ transplanting
From printing industrial prototypes to prosthetics and surgical instruments, 3 D bioprinting technology shows excellent progress and great promise in creating functional tissue and living organs intermediate stage towards organ-level complexity. Despite the limitations associated with biology and engineering, bioprinting holds great promise in whole-organ printing with an excellent hierarchical arrangement of cells and building tissue blocks in a 3D microenvironment. To print a living tissue, cells are taken from either a patient or adult stem cells and cultivated into a bioink. These ingredients are held together through some sort of dissolvable gel or scaffold, which can support the cells and mould them into the desired shape. Current advanced imaging technology, such as computed tomography (CT), enabled the creation of accurate CAD models for 3D printing to ensure a perfect fit into the desired tissue [Vignesh et al 2017]. The bioprinted organ (organ blueprint) is printed by especially in ‘bioprinter friendly’ stereo lithography (STL) format, is basically printed by dispensing the bioink with a computer-controlled, using specific software, and placing layer on a layer using a dispensing pumps. Printing body parts may well be the next step in organ transplantation – harvesting stem cells from a transplant recipient and printing them into a replacement organ could help bypass complications associated with organ transplants such as long waits for a suitable donor or immune rejection of the new organ. A number of breakthroughs in 3D bioprinting were demonstrated recently to create organ-level structures including bone [Huang et al 2019], Cornea [Isaacson, et al 2018], cartilage [Jeon et al 2019], heart [Noor et al 2019] and skin [Baltazar et al 2019]. Fabrication of fully developed vascularized organs would allow building functional/living human organ constructs suitable for surgical implantation. However, achieving this target still facing many challenges particularly, post-processing remoldelling associated with tissue fusion, retraction and compaction of the printed soft-tissue construct [Mironov et al 2008]. Therefore, blueprint tissue/organs cannot be directly derived from clinical scanning images. To get the desirable organ size and shape, CAD must include experimentally estimated coefficients of specific tissue compaction, retraction and remodelling [Mironov et al 2008].