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Artificial vascularized scaffolds for 3D-tissue regeneration — a report of the ArtiVasc 3D Project

2. Introduction absolute minimum. The recently completed project
was four years in duration starting in November 2011.
The aim of this paper is to offer a perspective on this The project was coordinated by Fraunhofer ILT and
large and ambitious project. It aims to disseminate the involved 20 partners across Europe (see acknowledg-
main findings and achievements of the ArtiVasc 3D ments for the full list). The €7.8 million funding was
project to the wider international academic and re- obtained through peer-reviewed open competition
search community. The paper provides an overview of from the EU 7 Framework Programme call (FP7-
th
the aims and objectives of the project, summarizes the NMP-2010-Large-4, GA no.: 236416). More details
work conducted and highlights some of the most sig- about the project can be found in the project web-
nificant achievements with references to published site .
[1]
results where possible. The paper offers a critical re-
view of the project and the relative advantages and 3. Project Work Packages
disadvantages of the large, multidisciplinary, mul-
ti-center approach. As is typical in large European projects, the research
The multidisciplinary ArtiVasc 3D project consisted and development required was broken down into a
of a consortium of partners from research and indus- series of work packages (WP) covering three main
trial institutions across Europe. The project brought areas: material development and characterization,
together experts in biomaterials development, cell-ma- process development, and matrix tissue interaction
trix interaction, angiogenesis, tissue engineering, si- and tissue development. In total, 12 work packages
mulation, design and additive manufacturing to gener- were established as shown in Table 1. Work packages
ate bioartificial vascularized skin in a fully automated 1, 11 and 12, which are italicized, were largely con-
and standardized manufacturing approach, rapidly and cerned with the scientific coordination, dissemination
inexpensively. To achieve these aims, ArtiVasc 3D and management of the project.
needed to provide a micro- and nano-scale manufac-
turing and functionalization technology that would Table 1. List of work packages
enable the generation of fully vascularized bioartificial WP no. Description of work package
tissue capable of the necessary nutrition and metabol- WP1 Scientific coordination and definition of requirements
ism functions (illustrated in Figure 1). WP2 Material development and characterisation

WP3 Modelling and design
WP4 Process development
WP5 Biofunctionalization
WP6 Matrix-tissue interactions
WP7 Machine prototype development
WP8 Machine demonstration
WP9 Development of a vascularized composite tissue graft
WP10 Validation of a vascularized composite tissue graft
Dissemination, training, exploitation and IPR man-
WP11
agement
WP12 Project management

4. Material Development and Characterization
(WPs 2 and 5)

Figure 1. Conceptual illustration of the 3-layer, full thickness,
artificial skin construct. The overall goal of this section was to provide a new
tailored material combination that fulfilled the requ-
By overcoming these scientific and technical chal- irements for soft tissue engineering but was also
lenges, the project aimed to make a significant contri- compatible with additive manufacturing (AM) pro-
bution to improving and accelerating patient treatment cesses, specifically inkjet printing, stereolithography/
in emergencies and to reducing animal testing to an multiphoton polymerization (MPP) and electrospin-

94 International Journal of Bioprinting (2016)–Volume 2, Issue 1