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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Bioprinting with pre-cultured cellular constructs to-

wards tissue engineering of hierarchical tissues

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1
1
1*
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Makoto Nakamura , Tanveer A. Mir , Kenichi Arai , Satoru Ito , Toshiko Yoshida ,
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1,4
1,3
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Shintaroh Iwanaga , Hiromi Kitano , Chizuka Obara and Toshio Nikaido
1 Graduate School of Science and Engineering for Research (Engineering), University of Toyama, Toyama, 930-8555
Toyama, Japan
2 Graduate School of Medicine and Pharmaceutical Science for Research (Medicine), University of Toyama, Toyama,
Japan
3 Institute of Industrial Science, University of Tokyo, Japan
4 Department of Radiation Emergency Medicine, National Institute of Radiological Sciences, Japan

Abstract: The fabrication of physiologically active tissue constructs from various tissue elements are vital for estab-
lishing integrated bioprinting and transfer printing techniques as vital tools for biomedical research. Physiologically
functional tissues are hierarchically constructed from a variety of tissue subunits with different feature sizes and topo-
graphies. For example, skeletal muscles are composed of many muscle bundles, muscle fibers, and muscle cells respec-
tively. The fundamental constituents of all types of muscle tissues include various sized blood vessels, and vascular re-
lated cells. Nature has designed the direction of all the aforementioned components to have unidirectional alignment, so
that muscle contractions can effectively generate the mechanical functions.
In this study, we demonstrate a promising approach to fabricating such hierarchical tissues by applying bioprinting
and a transfer patterning technique. Linear-patterned smooth muscle cells were obtained by culturing on the surface
patterned discs, before being transferred onto the Matrigel substrate. The fiber-like tissues structures were successfully
formed on the substrate after a few days of culturing; these are partially aligned smooth muscle cells. Additionally,
stacked structures were also successfully fabricated using laminating printing technique. Our results indicate that bio-
printing and transfer printing strategy of pre-cultured aligned muscular fiber-like tissues is very promising method to
assemble tissue elements for biofabrication of hierarchical tissues.
Keywords: transfer cell printing, pre-cultured cell printing, laminating printing, fiber-like tissues

*Correspondence to: Makoto Nakamura, Graduate School of Science and Engineering for Research (Engineering), University of Toyama,
Toyama, 930-8555 Toyama, Japan; Email: maknaka@eng.u-toyama.ac.jp

Received: May 5, 2015; Accepted: June 16, 2015; Published Online: July 2, 2015
Citation: Nakamura M, Mir T A, Arai K, et al. 2015, Bioprinting with pre-cultured cellular constructs towards tissue engineering of
hierarchical tissues. International Journal of Bioprinting, vol.1(1): 39–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJB.2015.01.007.

1. Introduction saved leading to an increasing demand for healthy
O wing to great progress in organ transplanta- engineering and regenerative medicine studies have
organs. Over the past few years, revolutionary tissue
been carried out allowing the development of tissue
tion, many patients who have suffered from
serious organ failure have been treated and
substitutes for regenerating or replacing defective,

Bioprinting with pre-cultured cellular constructs towards tissue engineering of hierarchical tissues. © 2015 Makoto Nakamura, et al. This is an Open
Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited.
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