Development of a new extrusion-based 3D printing method and its application to esophagus tissue engineering

Abstract

Most of the tubular tissues and organs in the human body have a hierarchical structure with various cellular components. For this, in the field of tubular tissue engineering have been widely studying to fabricate of the multilayered construct using the various manufacturing technique such as electrospinning, cell-sheet, 3D bioprinting. Despite many attempts of the tissue engineered approaches, there are still challenges to create the functional 3D structure which has a biomimetic multi-layered construct and multi-cellular component similar to the native tissue. In this study, we developed an extrusion-based 3D printing method (dragging technique) which can build the multi-layered free-form 3D tubular structure with the controllable pore structure on each layer. Additionally, the dragging technique can allow the embedding of the various biophysical and biochemical materials, including target cells into the 3D printed multi-layered construct. Based on the suggested technique, we fabricated a bioprinted 3D esophageal structure with biomimetic morphological features and converged with biochemical microenvironmental cue of an esophageal tissue by using porcine derived decellularized bioinks from mucosa and muscular tissue. The fabricated the esophagus construct using the dragging technique has not only to produce a controllable pore structure, free-form, multi-layered but also mimic the multi-cellular arrangement of the actual esophagus. The esophagus constructs investigated as suitable for alternative esophagus regeneration through the in-vitro experiments.