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REVIEW ARTICLE

Recent cell printing systems for tissue engineering

1,a
2
1,a
1*
1,a
Hyeong-jin Lee , Young Won Koo , Miji Yeo , Su Hon Kim and Geun Hyung Kim
1 Department of Biomechatronic Engineering, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Sungkyunkwan University
(SKKU), Suwon, 16419, Korea
2 Department of Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, Virginia, VA 24061, USA
a These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract: Three-dimensional (3D) printing in tissue engineering has been studied for the bio mimicry of the structures
of human tissues and organs. Now it is being applied to 3D cell printing, which can position cells and biomaterials, such
as growth factors, at desired positions in the 3D space. However, there are some challenges of 3D cell printing, such as
cell damage during the printing process and the inability to produce a porous 3D shape owing to the embedding of cells
in the hydrogel-based printing ink, which should be biocompatible, biodegradable, and non-toxic, etc. Therefore, re-
searchers have been studying ways to balance or enhance the post-print cell viability and the print-ability of 3D cell
printing technologies by accommodating several mechanical, electrical, and chemical based systems. In this
mini-review, several common 3D cell printing methods and their modified applications are introduced for overcoming
deficiencies of the cell printing process.
Keywords: bioink, cell-printing, tissue engineering

*Correspondence to: Geun Hyung Kim, Department of Biomechatronic Engineering, College of Biotechnology and Bioengineering, Sung-
kyunkwan University (SKKU), Suwon, Korea; E-mail: gkimbme@skku.edu

Received: November 10, 2016; Accepted: November 30, 2016; Published Online: January 5, 2017
Citation: Lee H, Koo Y, Yeo M, et al., 2017, Recent cell printing systems for tissue Engineering. International Journal of Bioprint-
ing, vol.3(1): 27–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/IJB.2017.01.004.

1. Introduction structures of anatomically modeled patient tissues and
S concept, printing of artificial tissues, such as the
[7]
organs from CT or MRI image data . Based on this
ince the stereolithographic 3D printer (SLA)
was invented by Chuck Hull (the co-founder of
[8–12]
, and organs like
ear, blood vessels, skin, bladder
3D Systems Co.), 3D printing has been applied
to various fields of industry, including tissue engi- the heart or liver will be expected soon.
The conventional 3D printing technology has pri-
neering application, namely, 3D bioprinting techni- nted porous tissue-engineered scaffolds with natural or
[1]
que . This technique involves printing bioink, which synthetic polymers, which are biocompatible and bio-
consisted of various biomaterials with and without degradable, and seeded cells on the designed struc-
live cells, in a layer-by-layer fabrication for human tures. However, this technique has been quite passive
tissue regeneration [2–6] . One of the bioprinting proce- owing to its dependence on the cell viability of the
sses, the cell printing system, which can position cells scaffolds, while the new 3D cell printing method
in a desired region, has been accomplished via nu- can be more active by controlling the amount and po-
merous studies of 3D structure fabrication using natu- sition of various cell-types within the scaffolds. This
ral and synthetic hydrogel polymers. Recently, W. Sun process was well introduced in the work of Wilson
proposed computer-aided tissue engineering; the con- and Boland [13] . They succeeded in printing bioinks
cept involves printing of 3D interconnected porous that contained live cells instead of the conservative

Recent cell printing systems for tissue engineering © 2017 Hyeong-jin Lee. 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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