Advancing bio-printing of living cells for regenerative medicine

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Expected Outcome: This topic aims at supporting activities that are enabling or contributing to one or several expected impacts of destination “Developing and using new tools, technologies and digital solutions for a healthy society”. To that end, proposals under this topic should aim to deliver results that are directed at, tailored towards and contributing to most of the following expected outcomes: Biomedical scientists from academia and industry will gain access to entire bio-printing units designed to regenerate human tissue. Healthcare professionals acquire information on the safe and effective use of equipment enabling advanced therapies with bio-printed human tissue. Healthcare providers dispose of tools enabling them to treat conditions of unmet medical need. Individual patients will benefit from a personalised approach to their respective medical condition thanks to the bio-printed regenerative medicine solution. Scope: Tissue-specific functional 3D bio-printing of living cells has made significant progress as a new approach for transplantation applications in regenerative medicine. There are currently several types of bio-printing technologies under development for the repair of different targeted tissues or organs. To fully unleash the potential of bio-printed cell constructs for regenerative medicine several bottlenecks still need to be overcome. Various studies in pre-clinical models have shown that bio-printed cell constructs or tissues hold great promise for regenerative medicine, by allowing autologous tissue grafts being printed thus avoiding adverse graft-host reactions. However, translation of such approaches into clinical settings (i.e. humans) and their application to internal organs still needs to be investigated and demonstrated. Dependant on the actual target site (i.e. the defect tissue or organ in the human body) different bio-printing approaches may be preferable. For printing complex tissues and especially entire organs an in-vitro approach followed by transplantation is the preferred way. “In-situ” bio-printing, sometimes also referred to as “in-vivo”, or as “intraoperative”, reflects a bioprinting process performed on a live subject in a surgical setting and has in certain instances (e.g. tissue repair) advantages over an in-vitro bio-printing technique followed by transplantation. In-situ bio-printing involves direct patterning of bio-inks onto a patient’s body at the target site, allowing for precise construction of a site-matching tissue-structure within the actual physiological location where regeneration or repair is needed. As such, in-situ bio-printing allows for high adaptability, reduced risk of contamination, improved cell viability, function and host integration. The high cell densities present in the human vital organs underscore the importance of bio-inks which contain less additional biomaterials as matrix. Hence the bio-printing of cell constructs that comprise native tissue-like cell densities may…