Volumetric bioprinting for medical applications

Abstract

Additive manufacturing (3D printing) has been a widely used tool in a lot of different industries. Among these industries can be found tissue engineering and regenerative medicine, since bioprinting is one of the main techniques applied. The implementations of new technologies for additive manufacturing, have been adapted into the bioprinting area for medical purposes. Additive manufacturing technologies have been evolving from printing point-to-point, layer-by-layer, and more recently volumetric printing, which represents printing a whole volume simultaneously. In this thesis is presented a new technique for bioprinting, the Computed Axial Lithography (CAL) printing, which is a recently additive manufacturing technology based on reconstruct- ing a volume simultaneously, has demonstrated to have advantages against other additive manufacturing techniques, improving the printing speed, the resolution, minimum material waste, and more, and its application in the medicine industry has not been explorer looking very promising for this research field with limitless applications. The bioink used in the experiments presented is a GelMA-based hydrogel, and the 3D structures achieved should be capable of present biocompatibility with living organisms. For this thesis, the reproduction of the CAL printing for biomaterials, in this particular case GelMA, is proved, opening the doors for applying the same concept to different biomaterials, which could have limitless applications in many distinct research areas.