A bioprinting platform for the rapid, reliable, controlled and quantifiable patterning of cellular aggregates and microtissues into macroscale regenerative grafts with programmable architectures

A fundamental limitation with current approaches aiming to bioprint tissues and organs is an inability to generate constructs with truly biomimetic composition and structure, resulting in the development of engineered tissues that cannot execute their specific function in vivo.

This is perhaps unsurprising, as many tissues and organs continue to mature postnatally, often taking many years to attain the compositional and structural complexity that is integral to their function.

A potential solution to this challenge is to engineer tissues that are more representative of an earlier stage of development, using bioprinting to not only generate such constructs, but to also provide them with guiding structures and biochemical cues that supports their maturation into fully functional tissues or organs within damaged or diseased in vivo environments.

It has recently been demonstrated that such developmental processes are better recapitulated in ‘microtissues’ or ‘organoids formed from self-organizing (multi)cellular aggregates, motivating their use as biological building blocks for the engineering of larger scale tissues and organ.

The main goal of micro2MACRO (m2M) is to develop a new bioprinting platform capable of spatially patterning numerous cellular aggregates or microtissues into scaled-up, personalised durable load-bearing grafts and guiding their (re)modelling into fully functional tissues in vivo within damaged or diseased environments.

This will be achieved using a converged bioprinting approach capable of rapidly depositing cells and microtissues into guiding scaffold structures with high spatial resolution in a rapid, reliable, reproducible and quantifiable manner.

These guiding structures will then function to direction the fusion and remodelling of cellular aggregates and microtissues into structurally organised tissues in vitro and in vivo, as well as providing medium-term (3-5-years) mechanical support to the regenerating tissue.