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RESEARCH PAPER

The development of cell-adhesive hydrogel for 3D

printing

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1
1,2
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1
Kenichi Arai , Yoshinari Tsukamoto , Hirotoshi Yoshida , Hidetoshi Sanae , Tanveer Ahmad Mir ,
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Shinji Sakai , Toshiko Yoshida , Motonori Okabe , Toshio Nikaido , Masahito Taya and Makoto
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Nakamura
1 Graduate School of Science and Engineering for Research, University of Toyama, Toyama, Japan
2 Department of Regenerative Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, Saga University, Saga, Japan
3 Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering Science, Osaka University, Osaka,
Japan
4 Department of Regenerative Medicine, Graduate School of Medicine and Pharmaceutical Sciences, University of To-
yama, Toyama, Japan

Abstract: Biofabrication has gained tremendous attention for manufacturing functional organs or tissues. To fabricate
functional organs or tissues, it is necessary to reproduce tissue-specific micro to macro structures. Previously, we de-
veloped a custom-made 3D-bioprinter with the capability to print and fabricate 3D complicated hydrogel structures
composed of living cells. Through the gelation reaction, fine and complicated 3D gel structures can be fabricated via
layer by layer printing. Alginate hydrogel has been used mainly due to its good fabricating properties. However, it is not
a reliable platform for tissue regeneration because of its inadequate cell-adhesiveness. Therefore, our laboratory is in-
terested to explore more suitable hydrogels for bioprinting and 3D tissue fabrication. In this study, we tried to fabricate
3D gel structures with enough cell-adhesive properties. We focused on hydrogel formation through enzymatic reaction
by incorporating materials bearing phenolic hydroxyl moieties and horseradish peroxidase. We examined Alg-Ph and
Alg-Ph/Gelatin-Ph gels. We used a mixed solution of applied materials as bioink and printed into H 2 O 2 solution. We
successfully fabricated the 3D gel sheet structures including fibroblasts cultures. Fibroblast proliferation and viability
were also observed in the 3D gel sheet for more than one week. In conclusion, the hydrogel obtained through enzymatic
reaction is a biocompatible bioink material which can be applied to fabricate 3D cell-adhesive gel structures using a
3D-bioprinter.
Keywords: biomaterials, 3D-bioprinter, biofabrication

*Correspondence to: Makoto Nakamura, Graduate School of Science and Technology for Research, University of Toyama, 930-8555,
Toyama, Japan; Email: maknaka@eng.u-toyama.ac.jp
Received: January 29, 2016; Accepted: April 21, 2016; Published Online: June 22, 2016
Citation: Arai K, Tsukamoto Y, Yoshida H, et al. 2016, The development of cell-adhesive hydrogel for 3D printing. International
Journal of Bioprinting, vol.2(2): 153–162. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJB.2016.02.002.

1. Introduction cartilage have already been applied in clinical medi-
T still limited to only the organs which have the proper-
[1–5]
. However, successfully engineered organs are
cine
issue engineering has been significantly pro-
gressing toward the final goal of providing
ty of thin tissues with simple structures. The long term
human tissues and organs for medical applica-
such as heart and liver, which are thick and complicated
tion. Artificially engineered organs such as skin and target of tissue engineering is to produce major organs

The development of cell-adhesive hydrogel for 3D printing. © 2016 Kenichi Arai, 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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