Biofabrication and 3D bioprinting
Building tissue constructs layer by layer — depositing cells and matrix with spatial control.
Biofabrication applies additive manufacturing to living material: cells and matrix precursors are deposited layer by layer to build a construct with defined internal architecture. Where conventional scaffold fabrication produces a porous block that cells are then seeded onto, bioprinting places cells where they are wanted from the start.
The material printed — a bioink — is usually a hydrogel chosen for a narrow window of properties: fluid enough to extrude, stiff enough to hold shape, and gentle enough that cells survive shear during printing. That trade-off is the field's central difficulty. Printing internal channels to address the diffusion limit is one of its most compelling applications.
For harder tissue, the relationship to printed bone scaffolds is close, though those are often printed without cells and seeded afterward. Most bioprinting remains preclinical; it is a manufacturing advance whose biology is still catching up.
Related articles
- Biomaterials3D-printed bone scaffoldsAdditive manufacturing lets scaffold architecture be specified directly — and patient-specific.
- BiomaterialsHydrogelsWater-swollen polymer networks whose softness is the point — the closest synthetic analogue to soft tissue.
- FoundationsVascularization: the diffusion limitWhy engineered tissue thicker than a couple of hundred microns fails without a blood supply — the field's most stubborn bottleneck.
- BiomaterialsScaffold design principlesPorosity, strength, and degradation rate — the competing requirements every scaffold has to reconcile.
- FoundationsWhat is regenerative medicine?An introduction to the field that aims to restore the structure and function of damaged tissue rather than merely replace it.
- FoundationsThe principles of tissue engineeringCells, scaffolds, and signals — the three-part framework underlying most attempts to build living tissue.