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EDITORIAL

Publication Trends in 3D Bioprinting and 3D Food

Printing

Editor-in-Chief: Chee Kai Chua
Engineering Product Development Pillar, Singapore University of Technology and Design, 8 Somapah Road, Singapore
487372, Singapore
http://dx/doi.org/10.18063/ijb.v6i1.257

In the past two decades, major advances have and the number of bioprinting related technical
been made in the field of three-dimensional (3D) publications has been increasing steadily in the
bioprinting [1-3] . The term “three-dimensional past 5 years (Figure 1).
(3D) bioprinting” is defined as “the use of According to a comprehensive market survey
computer-aided transfer processes for patterning by Roots Analysis , there are currently more
[9]
and assembling living and non-living materials than 70 bioprinters available which are either
with a prescribed 2D or 3D organization in order commercialized or under development, and more
to produce bioengineered structures serving in than 60% of these bioprinters utilize the extrusion
regenerative medicine, pharmacokinetic, and technology for material deposition. It can be
basic cell biology studies” [4-7] . As opposed to observed from Figure 1 that the extrusion-based
conventional tissue engineering approaches, 3D printing technique remains to be the most widely
bioprinting allows scalable and reproducible used method in bioprinting, in which its popularity
deposition of bioinks (biomaterials, living can be largely attributed to its fast printing speed,
cells, and growth factors) with the use of highly wide acceptance range of printable materials ,
[4]
advanced and automated additive manufacturing and also the wide availability of commercial
platforms. Complex bioengineered constructs can extrusion-based bioprinters. Moreover, each
be fabricated by depositing bioinks, layer by layer, printing technique has its own merits and the
with precise control of the spatial arrangement of selection of suitable printing techniques for
these functional components [4,8] . bioprinting is application dependent.
The printing techniques for 3D bioprinting Moving over to 3D food printing, 3D food
are commonly categorized into these five major printing remains an emerging field as compared
categories : (a) Extrusion, (b) stereolithography, to 3D bioprinting. The use of food materials with
[4]
(c) inkjet, (d) laser-assisted, and (e) microvalve- additive manufacturing technology, or commonly
based bioprinting. Hence, these keywords , known as 3D food printing [10-12] , has captivated the
[4]
“bioprinting technique – extrusion, commercial sector for the past decade with potential
stereolithography, inkjet, laser assisted, or convenience of low-cost food customization and
microvalve based” + “biomaterials” + “cells,” are precise nutrition control. In recent years, 3D food
used to search for bioprinting related technical printing related research is gaining momentum
publications from Web of Science. Data have with increased attention from the academic field
shown that research related to bioprinting has and its technical publications has also increased
clearly grown exponentially since the year 2000 significantly (Figure 2).

© 2020 Chua. 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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