3D Printing: Challenges and Its Prospect in Futuristic Tissue Engineering Applications

Additive manufacturing in the healthcare sector has promisingly paved its way since the failure of implants, and tissue analogs resulted from the improper fabrication strategies of conventional manufacturing procedures. High energy source additive manufacturing strategies are optimum in regard to the appropriate mimicking of the shape of the host tissue or organ. However, there are subtle issues which critically impact the final outcome of the whole process, i.e., imaging of the patients’ tissue, reconstruction of the model, fabrication, and surgery. In many of the high-energy laser sintering facilities, the choice of the materials is very shallow. Moreover, cell-laden constructs are highly questionable to be used within these processes as it requires very low temperature (~37 °C) and low stress in the environment for the cells to be functional. Due to these drawbacks of other procedures, extrusion-based procedures have become popularly explored and utilized, leading the current additive manufacturing front in healthcare. Further advancement in 3D printing was also discussed which were able to print structures in the submicron range. A newly introduced technique, two-photon-based polymerization—direct laser writing-based printing of microstructures is gaining much attention. Owing to its capability to print three-dimensional architectures, which can exactly mimic the in vivo microenvironment, the structures can be easily deployed to study cell–cell or cell–matrix interaction. Moreover, resolution and complexity of the microstructures printed using the above technique can be used as an in vivo equivalent model for studying cell–drug interactions. The utility of 3D printing for fabrication of microfluidic devices was also discussed as such devices can be further adopted for microbioreactor applications. The fabrication of such microfluidic bioreactor-based system helps to exactly mimic the biochemical or biophysical parameters like temperature, pH, or concentration of nutrients. The study concludes that 3D printing technique can be adopted not only for creating excellent microstructures or systems for futuristic tissue engineering application.