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EDITORIAL

Bioprinting in space and International Journal of

Bioprinting stays ahead of the game

Editor-in-Chief: Chee Kai Chua

Executive Director, Singapore Centre for 3D Printing (SC3DP), School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE),
Nanyang Technological University, N3.1-B2c-03a, 50 Nanyang Avenue, Singapore - 639798
http://dx/doi.org/10.18063/ijb.v5i1.E.

Now, bioprinting in space is no longer a dream but a • Special issue: Bioprinting in the USA (Guest Editor:
reality! Ming Leu).
Early December 2018, a magnetic three-dimensional • Special issue: Bioprinting and biofabrication for tissue
(3D) bioprinter was successfully sent to International engineering in Asia (Guest Editor: Jerry Fuh).
Space Station by Russian spacecraft Soyuz MS-11. • Special issue: Bioprinting in Germany (Guest Editor:
Since then, various tissue/organ printing experiments Boris N. Chichkov).
have been conducted, and the results are expected to be • Special issue: Bioprinting in Europe (except Germany)
released in February 2019. The scientific question whether (Guest Editors: Shoufeng Yang and Jing Yang).
living tissues printed under zero gravity maturates faster Being one of the leading journals in bioprinting, the
than that printed on earth will soon be answered. These January 2019 issue of IJB is proud to present a total of
extraordinary experiments conducted in space could shed 12 original research articles and reviews. Four of them
light on new strategies of quality tissue construction while report on a new and emerging bioprinting process, namely
achieving rapid tissue maturation. the electrohydrodynamic printing technology. Kolan
The other exciting news is the continued development et al. printed 3D biomimetic structures using a polymer/
of International Journal of Bioprinting (IJB). The table bioactive glass composite , while Sun et al. developed a
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below shows the achievement of IJB in 2018. According microscopic image identification technique to monitor the
to Clarivate Analytics, IJB is on track to be evaluated for printing process . Gao and Zhou reviewed the mechanisms
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inclusion into SCI around October 2019. When accepted, of electrohydrodynamic printing as well its state-of-the-
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IJB will receive official impact factor in June 2020.
art designs and applications . Cheptsov et al. reviewed
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new microorganism isolation techniques with emphasis
Web of Science 2017 Mock Impact Factor 5.143 on laser printing . Khan et al. presented the optimization
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(ESCI) 2018 Mock Impact Factor 4.429 (26 Nov 2018) outcome of printing novel ultrashort peptide bioinks .
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Moreover, Liu et al. reported a hybrid fabrication approach
Scopus 2017 2017 CiteScore N.A. of printing polymer/hydrogel scaffolds but with in-process
CiteScore 2018 Citescore tracker 4.5 (8 Dec 2018) plasma treatment . Similarly, Moldovan et al. reviewed
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the potential of hybrid biofabrication of 3D tissue analogs
In addition, five special issues have been initiated in in future . Both works suggest that hybrid bioprinting
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2019 to highlight the latest development of bioprinting could be a new direction in research. In addition, Yang
technology globally. This will definitely increase the et al. reviewed additive manufacturing of bone scaffolds ,
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visibility of IJB in various countries. I would like to and Mir et al. offered a perspective on how to overcome
thank Makoto, Ming, Jerry, Boris, Shoufeng, and Jing for the obstacles and challenges in tissue engineering
their strong support. I also welcome more special issue through bioprinting . Finally, Rodriguez-Salvador and
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proposals. her colleagues, report two bibliometric studies on recent
• Special issue: Bioprinting in Japan (Guest Editor: trends in bioprinting, one in the dentistry applications
[11]
Makoto Nakamura). and the other in the optical tissue phantoms .
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Bioprinting science. © 2019 Chua C K. 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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