Invited: 3D Bioprinting: A New Paradigm in Tissue Engineering

It is often necessary to rebuild tissues that have lost function or are destroyed by disease or injury. In this talk I will discuss the use of a novel fabrication technique called free form fabrication to build biological membranes from their constituent cells and matrices. We have developed an on-demand 3D printing platform to build a fully functional and viable human skin in a layer-by-layer fashion. Our preliminary studies demonstrate that this approach can reproduce many biological and morphological features of human skin. Printed human skin sections can be used as engineered grafts or for assessing inflammatory or immunological responses of topical agents on skin. The general platform can also be extended to the design and fabrication of other complex organs and tissues.