Bioprinter
Delta 3D Bioprinters
What is Bioprinting?
Bioprinting refers to the technology which creates a three-dimensional shape using biomaterials. It is common to use biomaterials including biodegradable polymers, hydrogels, and extracellular matrix (ECM) in single or in combination, sometimes adding growth factors depending on the improvement of biocompatibility or the purpose of the experiment.
Initially, the printed outputs using only biomaterials have been used for scaffolds where cells can settle and grow, or have been studied as implants of skeletons. However, recently, many functional kinds of research are actively ongoing beyond a simple structural study, with printed living cell masses.
Applications of Bioprinting
- Regenerative Medicine Research
- It is actively applied for the reproduction of biological tissue structures, in regenerative medicine studies of tissues including the skeleton, skin, liver, heart, nerves, and cornea.
- Stem Cell Research
- It is used for the purpose of studying stem cell differentiation at the tissue or organ level.
- Cancer Disease Research
- It is used for the purpose of reproducing the structural characteristics of cancer tissues, observing interactions with the underlying tissues, and observing mechanisms of metastasis.
- Developmental Biology Research
- It is applied to research on the role of structures in the biological development stage.
Features of Bioprinting
- Create an Arbitrary Three-dimensional Shape
- Bioprinting technology makes users create arbitrarily shaped masses as they want. That was significantly difficult with traditional experimental methods. Bioprinting technology can create a three-dimensional structure on sub-mm levels of precision, so that users could expand their research methodology and area.
- Mimic the Clinical Research Environment
- Bioprinting technology provides the research environment of the tissue or organ level. Typically, it has been conducted biological experiments at the cellular level. The cell study is limited by a low predictive power around 0.02% for the result of clinical tests, due to an environmental difference. Bioprinting technology could provide a more realistic and similar environment with the clinical tests by reproducing a stereoscopic environment and structure. It provides tissue or organ level research environment, beyond the cellular level. The bioprinted outputs are expected to expand the clinical applicability.
- Make Results Repeatable and Reproducible
- Bioprinting technology minimizes errors based on robotic automation technology. It improves the reliability of the experiment results and enables efficient and economic research by reducing sample to sample variation and batch to batch variation. It is easy to occur human errors and handling errors for experiments in a manual manner, depending on researchers. That might increase the number of experiments to eliminate the effects of errors, which comes to increase costs. Using bioprinting technology allowing produce homogeneous samples could have reproducible experiment results. It is expected to enable swift and efficient research and development by reducing the number of repetitions for results verification.