Scaffold-Free Vascular Tissue Engineering Using Bioprinting

By Cyrille Norotte, F. Marga, Laura E. Niklason, Gabor Forgacs. Biomaterials, 2009

1,294 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Current limitations of exogenous scaffolds or extracellular matrix based materials have underlined the need for alternative tissue-engineering solutions. Scaffolds may elicit adverse host responses and interfere with direct cell-cell interaction, as well as assembly and alignment of cell-produced ECM. Thus, fabrication techniques for production of scaffold-free engineered tissue constructs have recently emerged. Here we report on a fully biological self-assembly approach, which we implement through a rapid prototyping bioprinting method for scaffold-free small diameter vascular reconstruction. Various vascular cell types, including smooth muscle cells and fibroblasts, were aggregated into discrete units, either multicellular spheroids or cylinders of controllable diameter (300 to 500 μm). These were printed layer-by-layer concomitantly with agarose rods, used here as a molding template. The post-printing fusion of the discrete units resulted in single- and double-layered small diameter vascular tubes (OD ranging from 0.9 to 2.5 mm). A unique aspect of the method is the ability to engineer vessels of distinct shapes and hierarchical trees that combine tubes of distinct diameters. The technique is quick and easily scalable.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Surgery

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fb15876d4d3a1d5d90235fbc1707fef11faf916b

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Citations in the corpus

Direct 3D bioprinting of perfusable vascular constructs using a blend bioink (2016, positive): “Alternatively, agarose rods were printed concomitantly as a temporary building blocks of a molding template to support the fusion of multicellular spheroids or cylinders into vessel-like structures [20,26].”
Biofabrication: A Guide to Technology and Terminology. (2017, neutral): “Adapted, with permission, from [121] and [81].”
Recent advances in 3D printing of biomaterials (2015, background): “Bioprinting materials are agarose with human umbilical vein smooth muscle cells (HUVSMCs) and human skin fibroblasts (rods) [119], gelatin-HA-tetraPEG-DA with NIH 3T3s (rods) [120], rat primary bladder smooth muscle cells in collagen droplets [114], human micro-vascular endothelial cells in fibrin…”
A review of trends and limitations in hydrogel-rapid prototyping for tissue engineering. (2012, neutral): “preparation methods have been described [264,266,285,289].”
Vascularization and Angiogenesis in Tissue Engineering: Beyond Creating Static Networks. (2016, background): “Complex 3D vascular networks can also be prepared directly using technology such as bioprinting [47–49], which allows for the placement of either cellular aggregates [50] (Figure 1E) or biomaterials containing cells [51] at a specific location with a high level of spatial control.”