Biofabrication in Tissue Engineering

Abstract Organ biofabrication techniques offer the potential to produce living 3D tissue constructs to repair or replace damaged or diseased human tissues and organs. Using these advanced Biofabrication techniques, constructs exhibiting spatial variation of cells, cellular building blocks, growth factors, and mechanical properties along multiple axes with high geometric complexity can be obtained. The level of control offered by these technologies to develop complex biofabricated tissues will allow tissue engineers to better study factors that modulate tissue formation and function, and provide a valuable tool to study graft performance as well as for high throughput screening of drug candidates in biofabricated tissue organoid models. In this chapter, we discuss the history behind biofabrication and cell and organ bioprinting, and the rationale for developing organ bioprinting or bioassembly techniques with respect to limitations of current clinical tissue engineering strategies to effectively repair damaged tissues. We discuss current 3-dimesional strategies for assembling cells as well as the necessary support materials such as hydrogels, bioinks and natural and synthetic polymers adopted for organ biofabrication research. Furthermore, given the current state-of-the-art in biofabrication technologies, we discuss some of their limitations and provide recommendations for future developments in this rapidly growing field.