Speaker
Description
Biofabrication technologies, including extrusion bioprinting, bioassembly, digital light processing (DLP) and volumetric bioprinting (VBP), offer the potential to engineer constructs consisting of cell-laden bioinks, tissue modules, and/or bioactive factors that replicate the complex 3D organization of native tissues. Despite rapid advances however, development of individual bioinks for each biofabrication technique and specific tissue niche is required, limiting rapid innovation and scalability for advanced biological applications. Our overall goals are to address major bottlenecks that remain in designing materials that are both cell-instructive and harness 3D biofabrication to deliver multiple modular and dynamic cell microenvironments.
This talk discusses alternative strategies to engineer highly tuneable hydrogel platforms that: 1) promote a specific cell-instructive niche using visible-light photocrosslinking in gelatin-based hydrogels, bioresins and high-throughput microgels, and 2) that can deliver multiple spatio-temporal cell-instructive micro-environments including, cell spheroids, native decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) materials, oxygen generation, hypoxia.
We describe design of a versatile photoinitiator system (Ru/SPS) and photo-clickable gelatin-based bioinks for biofabrication of 3D in vitro models. Tailoring macromolecular chemistry (eg allylated-gelatin hydrogels; GelAGE), we engineer the cell-instructive tissue niche for multiple cell types via covalent incorporation of thiolated bioactives and/or nanoparticles, dynamic stiffening hydrogels, as well as cross-linking of native decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) based bioinks in centimetre scale. Example applications discussed include engineering and 3D bioprinting of clinically-relevant human stem-cell microenvironments for osteochondral tissue regeneration, osteoarthritis disease models, tumour microenvironments, and human lipoaspirate grafts.
We further discuss experience in developing hybrid tissue constructs and convergence with 3D spheroid bio-assembly platforms for probing multicellular spheroid fusion, ECM formation and stem-cell niche, offering new paradigms for high-throughput screening and disease modelling in healthy and osteoarthritic spheroid fusion models.
Collectively, this work demonstrates the potential of using this cell-instructive platform for development of advanced bioinks and bioresins, advancing biofabrication and regenerative-medicine towards clinical translation
References:
1. A Norberg, E Bakirci, K Lim, P Dalton, T Woodfield, G Lindberg(2024). Biofabrication (2024).
2. G. Major, A. Longoni, J. Simcock, … R. Kemp, T. Woodfield, K. Lim (2023). Advanced Science. 10(26), 2300538.
3. C. Murphy, K Lim, T Woodfield (2022). Advanced Materials 34 (20).
4. X Cui, C Alcala-Orozco, … G Lindberg, GJ Hooper, K Lim, T Woodfield (2022). Biofabrication. 14, 034101.
5. G Lindberg, X Cui, … G Hooper, K Lim, T Woodfield (2021). Advanced Science. 8(22), 2103320.
6. H Kim, B Kang, X Cui, DW Cho, W Hwang, T Woodfield, K Lim, J Jang (2021). Advanced Functional Materials. 2011252.
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