Ruishan Liu1,Sebastian Timmler1,Yang Cao1,Yifei Pan1,Yan Yan Shery Huang1
University of Cambridge1
Ruishan Liu1,Sebastian Timmler1,Yang Cao1,Yifei Pan1,Yan Yan Shery Huang1
University of Cambridge1
The versatility and consistency of tissue engineering scaffolds could be vastly enhanced by converging different 3D printing, biofabrication, and data-driven techniques into a single process flow. Here, we report additive manufacturing of three-dimensional fibrous devices via integrating fused filament deposition and low-voltage electrospinning patterning. Polylactic acid scaffolds and gelatin fibres (with 3-5 um diameter and 150 um inter-fibre pitch) were printed automatically without manual stacking. Fibroblast cell line and brain cancer cell line were seeded onto the three-dimensional fibres. Cell attachment and proliferation experiments demonstrated good biocompatibility of the culture devices manufactured. We subsequently applied a machine learning model to find the correlations between operating parameters and fibre device quality. Future work involving multi-functional fibres deposition is proposed to accelerate the application of fibrous devices in tissue engineering and drug discovery applications.