A Review of 3D Printing Technology for Medical Applications

Abstract

Donor shortages for organ transplantations are a major clinical challenge worldwide. Potential risks that are inevitably encountered with traditional methods include complications, secondary injuries, and limited source donors. Three-dimensional (3D) printing technology holds the potential to solve these limitations; it can be used to rapidly manufacture personalized tissue engineering scaffolds, repair tissue defects in situ with cells, and even directly print tissue and organs. Such printed implants and organs not only perfectly match the patient’s damaged tissue, but can also have engineered material microstructures and cell arrangements to promote cell growth and differentiation. Thus, such implants allow the desired tissue repair to be achieved, and could eventually solve the donor-shortage problem. This review summarizes relevant studies and recent progress on four levels, introduces different types of biomedical materials, and discusses existing problems and development issues with 3D printing that are related to materials and to the construction of extracellular matrix in vitro for medical applications.

Keywords

3D printing / Implant / Scaffold / Biomedical material

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This work was sponsored by the National Key R&D Program of China (2016YFB1101303), the Wuhan Morning Light Plan of Youth Science and Technology (0216110066), and the Academic Frontier Youth Team at Huazhong University of Science and Technology.

Qian Yan, Hanhua Dong, Jin Su, Jianhua Han, Bo Song, Qingsong Wei, and Yusheng Shi declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.