Traditional strategies for bone tissue engineering are based on the facilitation of cell growth into engineered interconnecting scaffolds to generate a functional tissue construct for the reestablishment of structure and function in damaged bone tissues.

However, the realization of the desired levels of cell deposition and cell distribution in 3D scaffolds remains a great challenge. Although 3D-bioprinting method shows promise for a new approach in bone tissue engineering, the long term investigation is still limited.

A research group led by Dr. RUAN Changshun, Prof. PAN Haobo and Prof. LU William from Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology (SIAT), Chinese Academy of Sciences has made new progress in the 3D-bioprinted osteoblast-laden nanocomposite hydrogel system for bone regeneration.

In their work, a novel two-channel 3D-bioprinting method was used to fabricate the osteoblast-laden nanocomposite hydrogel constructs. The encapsulated osteoblasts not only shows high viability (>95%) just after bioprinting, the osteoblast-laden constructs also exhibits excellent osteogenic ability in the long term due to the induced suitable microenvironment, especially the ectopic osteogenesis in vivo. This 3D-bioprinting method holds much promise for bone tissue regeneration in terms of cell engraftment, survival, and ultimately long-term function.

The paper entitled “3D-bioprinted osteoblast-laden nanocomposite hydrogel constructs with induced microenvironments promote cell viability, differentiation and osteogenesis both in vitro and in vivo” has been published in Advanced Science.

The research work has been supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China, the Science and Technology Projects of Shenzhen, the Shenzhen Peacock Innovation Team and the Youth Talents of Guangdong Science and Technology Innovation.