Development of Heterogeneous Structures with Polycaprolactone-Alginate Using a New 3D Printing System - BioMEDβeta: Design and Processing

Direct Digital Manufacturing of implantable biomedical devices is the strategy for designing and constructing three dimensional (3D) structures. DDM (i.e., biomanufacturing) technologies have been widely used to construct complex 3D structures (scaffolds), where chemicals, biomaterials, and cells are deposited in a layer-by-layer fashion. These technologies control size, microarchitecture and pores interconnectivity in scaffolds, essential to transporting oxygen and nutrients for cell survival. As the Tissue engineering field progresses, new types of printers have been designed to accomplish functional engineered tissue constructs. However, the availability of innovative 3D biomanufacturing technologies for hard tissue and organ engineering is scarce and with several equipment limitations. In this work, a new biomanufacturing system, BioMEDβeta, composed of three different fabrication modules (thermoplastic micro-extrusion, multi-head deposition of hydrogels and electrospinning) was used to fabricate (3D) scaffolds using layer-by-layer alternated deposition of polycaprolactone and alginate hydrogel. The BioMEDβeta system demonstrates the possibility of obtaining scaffolds with well-defined architecture, using both natural and synthetic polymers. Nevertheless, there are still parameters to optimize related with the design of 3D constructs and materials processing.