Your questions answered: 3D bioprinting

While 3D printing becomes more established within  the manufacturing sector, one of its most exciting  uses, to create replacement body parts, remains in its infancy. We put your questions to some of the leading researchers in this exciting area. Responses are by:

Would 3D printing technology be able to reproduce working glands such as the pancreas to assist in insulin production?

DT: With future developments and research, this is an interesting application. However, biological architectures are extremely complex to engineer, and number of the cellular mechanisms are still not fully understood. What may be the best alternative approach is in developing the capability to make small engineered tissues for acting as dynamic biotools to repair damaged glands or tissues. Macro-tissue engineering  is something that is currently very interesting.

VM: This question does not have a yes/no answer. Tissue engineering is a highly inter-disciplinary field that integrates the principles of physics, chemistry and biology to engineer artificial organ and tissue systems for replacing damaged tissues in the body. Bioprinting [the term given to the technology that utilises 3D printing for tissue engineering applications] is one of the major tools in tissue engineering that has high potential  to pioneer the efforts made to engineer artificial organs. Bioprinting has already made a lot of strides in tissue engineering in the recent past and it is growing at a rapid pace at the moment. In the next five to 10 years, there is a huge scope for bioprinting to reach its pinnacle by enabling complex architecture, high viability, preservation of cell functionality and high speed of fabrication. However, there are other aspects that have to be advanced along with bioprinting to reproduce working glands outside the body such as designing complex biomaterials that satisfy the needs of cells at multiple levels, finding proper and sustainable cell sources, molecular cues and so on. Hence the success of tissue engineering depends on all the tools employed in tissue engineering, and bioprinting  is only one of many such major tools. So advances in bioprinting alone will not guarantee organs such as the pancreas but it will definitely  push the boundaries of paths leading to such innovation.