Tissue Engineering: A Myriad of Concepts

Dessie DiMino

3DPrinters have slowly become more commonplace as they become cheaper and smaller. Makerspaces and libraries have made them more accessible for the average consumer to use, normally to print something small and made only of single colored plastic. 3Dprinters have become prominent in many fields, most notably, tissue engineering. My research focused on 3Dinkjet printers, which unlike most 3Dprinters use a liquid ink, not a plastic. This allowed me to use the 3Dprinter to create a specific shape while keeping the final product soft enough to resemble tissues and support cell growth. The bioink was made with a polymer called hyaluronic acid (HA) which is a key component of extracellular matrices for supporting muscle structure.

Medicine
Materials