Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine has emerged as an innovative scientific field that focuses on development of new approaches for repairing cells, tissues and organs. While the current paradigm of utilizing combinations of biomaterial scaffolds and cells for tissue construction has shown to be effective, only a limited number of these technologies have been successfully translated to patients. This is due to various issues that are encountered in the tissue building process. Recent development of novel biomaterials, the discovery of new sources of cells, and advances in scaffold fabrication strategies are being applied to address these challenges. One of the challenges that hinder clinical translation is the inefficiency of current cell delivery methods. Living tissues maintain inherent multi-cellular heterogeneous structures, and rebuilding of such complex structures requires subtle arrangements of different cell types and extracellular matrix components at specific anatomical target sites. Inkjet printing technology has been proposed as a tool to address cell delivery concerns. In this session, this versatile method of building complex tissue structures will be discussed.
Tao Xu, James J. Yoo, "Inkjet Printing Technology for Regenerative Medicine" in Proc. IS&T Int'l Conf. on Digital Printing Technologies and Digital Fabrication (NIP24), 2008, pp 7 - 9, https://doi.org/10.2352/ISSN.2169-4451.2008.24.1.art00002_1