Engineering alginate as bioink for bioprinting

Abstract

Recent advances in 3D printing offer an excellent opportunity to address critical challenges faced by current tissue engineering approaches. Alginate hydrogels have been extensively utilized as bioinks for 3D bioprinting. However, most previous research has focused on native alginates with limited degradation. The application of oxidized alginates with controlled degradation in bioprinting has not been explored. Here, we prepared a collection of 30 different alginate hydrogels with varied oxidation percentages and concentrations to develop a bioink platform that can be applied to a multitude of tissue engineering applications. We systematically investigated the effects of two key material properties (i.e. viscosity and density) of alginate solutions on their printabilities to identify a suitable range of material properties of alginates to be applied to bioprinting. Further, four alginate solutions with varied biodegradability were printed with human adipose-derived stem cells (hADSCs) into lattice-structured, cell-laden hydrogels with high accuracy. Notably, these alginate-based bioinks were shown to be capable of modulating proliferation and spreading of hADSCs without affecting structure integrity of the lattice structures (except the highly degradable one) after 8 days in culture. This research lays a foundation for the development of alginate-based bioink for tissue-specific tissue engineering applications.