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RESEARCH ARTICLE

Multicomponent bioprinting of heterogeneous hydrogel

constructs based on microfluidic printheads

Fan Feng , Jiankang He *, Jiaxin Li , Mao Mao , Dichen Li 1,2
1,2
1,2
1,2
1,2
1 State Key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049, China
2 Rapid Manufacturing Research Center of Shaanxi Province, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, 710049, China
Abstract: Multimaterial bioprinting provides a promising strategy to recapitulate complex heterogeneous architectures of
native tissues in artificial tissue analogs in a controlled manner. However, most of the existing multimaterial bioprinting
techniques relying on multiple printing nozzles and complicate control program make it difficult to flexibly change the material
composition during the printing process. Here, we developed a multicomponent bioprinting strategy to produce heterogeneous
constructs using a microfluidic printhead with multiple inlets and one outlet. The composition of the printed filaments can be
flexibly changed by adjusting volumetric flow rate ratio. Heterogeneous hydrogel constructs were successfully printed to have
predefined spatial gradients of inks or microparticles. A rotary microfluidic printhead was used to maintain the heterogeneous
morphology of the printed filaments as the printing path direction changed. Multicellular concentric ring constructs with
two kinds of cell types distribution in the printed filaments were fabricated by utilizing coaxial microfluidic printhead and
rotary collecting substrate, which significantly improves the printing efficiency for multicomponent concentric structures. The
presented approach is simple and promising to potentially print multicomponent heterogeneous constructs for the fabrication
of artificial multicellular tissues.
Keywords: multicomponent printing; microfluidic printhead; bioprinting; heterogeneous constructs

*Correspondence to: Jiankang He, State key Laboratory for Manufacturing Systems Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 710049,
China; jiankanghe@mail.xjtu.edu.cn
Received: April 26, 2019; Accepted: June 4 2019; Published Online: July 1 2019

Citation: Feng F, He J, Li J, et al., 2019, Multicomponent bioprinting of heterogeneous hydrogel constructs based on
microfluidic printheads. Int J Bioprint, 5(2): 202. http://dx.doi.org/10.18063/ijb.v5i2.202

1. Introduction inks can be deposited at predefined positions through
switching the printheads. However, as types of inks
Recent achievements in bioprinting have showed increase, the number of printheads in a printing system
significant promise in fabricating artificial tissues to meet increases correspondingly, which brings complexity
the increasing demands for tissue engineering and drug
screening [1,2] . The most prevailing bioprinting techniques of design and printing control. The printing efficiency
are based on jetting and extrusion, which have less damage and accuracy might be negatively affected due to the
to cells during printing and widely adopted to produce switching of different printhead. In addition, it is almost
structures mimicking native tissues [3-6] . However, native impossible to continuously change the concentrations of
tissues are extremely complicated in both architectures various inks during the printing process.
and cell compositions. Extrusion-based printing with a Microfluidics showed great advantages in manipulating
single printhead cannot meet the increasing demands for multiple types of material flows by flexibly designing
complex tissues with multiple cell types. To address this internal microchannel networks, which provide a
challenge, multimaterial printing strategies are developed promising way to achieve multimaterial bioprinting in
by incorporating multiple separated printheads to print a relatively simple manner [15-22] . Amir et al. designed a
several kinds of inks [7-14] . During printing, different stereolithography-based bioprinting platform which
Multicomponent bioprinting of heterogeneous hydrogel constructs based on microfluidic printheads © 2019 Feng, 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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