Marine-Based Scaffold 3D Bio-Printing System De-sign: A Preliminary Study

Background: Bio-printing has been emerged as a developing technology for human tissues reconstruction. Tissue engineer-ing and organ printing extremely depend on the development of an implicated 3D printing system which has the ability to accurately control the parameters. Bio-ink is the other most im-portant part of a 3D printed scaffold. The purpose of this pre-liminary study was a 3D bio-printer development and printing a bone scaffold using a marine-based bio-ink.Materials and Methods: Extruded deposition modeling (EDM) is utilized to setup the electromechanical part of the 3D printer possessing three-axis movement in X, Y and Z directions with micro-scale high resolution motion. A hydrogel marine-based bio-composite which encompassing living cells is exploited as a bio-ink to 3D print a bone scaffold. Accordingly, the extrusion process needs to be carried out through a mounted extruder on X axis with a highly accurate hydrogel extrusion. Needle size, syringe diameter and nozzle temperature were the parameters that effect the printing process and form the fundamentals of extrusion kit design for bio-printer.Results: The designed extrusion kit contains a nozzle that enables the user to 3D print a composite and geometrically complex biological scaffolds. We also developed an alginate-hydroxyapatitebased bio-ink to print the bone scaffold. Various factors such as the movements’ accuracy and bioink extrusion were controlled via electronic sensors. The particular param-eters were measured and sent to a central processing unit (AT-mega2560) to be processed. 3D CAD files were fed to the con-trol unit for slicing and G-code generation to control the axes movement in order to 3D print complex biological scaffolds. Conclusion: Using our developed 3D printer and the marine-based bio-inks we are now able to 3D print the biological or-gans and living scaffolds such as bone.