Sponsors: Ozark Biomedical Initiative, MO-SCI Corporation, Missouri S&T Intelligent Systems Center, Missouri S&T Center for Biomedical Research, Keith and Pat Bailey Professorship Fund
The objective of this research is to develop the cutting-edge 3D & 4D bioprinting technology for regenerative medicine including bone tissue engineering and wound healing. Bioprinting is an emerging technology that can spatially control the process of engineering tissues with different materials and cell types, which can be used for either therapeutic purposes or artificial tissue models for drug test and discovery. Further, it can be used to explore new knowledge of cell-material interactions in a wide range of physical dimensions and biological scales, from molecular to cellular to tissue.
Our bioprinting research is focused on creating biomimetic tissue constructs containing multiple biomaterials in bioinks. We have developed bioprinted cell-laden bone scaffolds and bioactive wound dressings with promising in vitro and in vivo results. Our research group not only investigates the fundamental scientific issues such as cell interactions with micro and nano environments, characterization of bioinks, and biomechanics, but also solves the technological and translational issues associated with tissue repair and regeneration. To address the current limitations in the field of bioprinting, we focus on vascularized tissue repair and regeneration by controlling the external geometry, microarchitecture, and chemical structure. The highly customizable CellInk Inkredible+ and Bio-X bioprinters available in our laboratory enable us to work with a variety of materials including gelatin, GelMa, alginate, chitosan, PLA, PCL, and bioactive glass in different scaffolds and other geometries