Urologic Survey (Basic Science)

Re: 3D Printing: A Revolutionary Advance for the Field of Urology?

10.4274/jus.2015.01.008

  • Fehmi Narter

J Urol Surg 2015;2(1):43-43

3D bioprinting based on thermal inkjet has great potential to develop promising approaches in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine for organ replacement. With layer by layer assembly, 3D tissues with complex structures can be printed using scanned CT or MRI images. The traditional tissueengineering approach of seeding the isolated cells to the pre-formed solid and rigid scaffolds was introduced in 1993 by Langer and Vacanti. With the thermal inkjet printers, the viability of printed mammalian cells at the different cell concentrations were varying from 85-95%. Bioprinting is flexible in that it can accommodate abroad variety of materials including organ-specific cells, blood vessels, smooth muscle and endothelial cells. With the 3D bioprinters, vascular or nevre systems can be enabled simultaneously during the organ construction with digital control. The research field of tissueengineering has seen explosive growth over the past five years where testing is stil primarily limited to animal specimens. In the literature, A. Atala and et al. demostared the power of 3D printing in thefield of urology. Especially, at the endstage of renal disease and bladder dysfunctions, tissue enginnering will be hopeful for the part of alternative treatment modality in nearfuture.