doi:10.7244/cmj.2017.03.002
Dominic Kwan
It can be argued that the concept of bioengineering began when Alexis Carrel and Charles Lindbergh published “The Culture of Organs” in 1938, which described the equipment and methods that made the in vitro maintenance of organs possible. The final chapter of the book mentions an ‘ultimate goal’ of increasing the speed of wound healing. From its conception in the 1980s to the present day, scientists and medical researchers alike have been investigating the exciting prospects that three-dimensional printing offers to the field of medicine. Over the course of three decades, advances in this technology have led to several famous milestones, in the process spawning the term ‘bioprinting’. In contemporary medicine, bioprinting is beginning to play a role in regenerative medicine and clinical research by providing scientists with the ability to build tissue-engineered scaffolds, prosthetic limbs, and even functioning kidneys. One of the earliest cases of bioprinting made international headlines in 1999 when the world’s first 3D printed collagen scaffold was used for bladder augmentation in dogs. Then, in 2009, researchers at Organovo Inc., a 3D bioprinting company in the United States, created the world’s first bioprinted blood vessels for hepatic tissue by printing tri-layered analogues formed of human fibroblasts (to represent the adventitia), smooth muscle cells (to represent the media), and vascular endothelial cells (to represent the intima).
