A review of 3D bio-printing for bone and skin tissue engineering: a commercial approach

The ultimate prospect of tissue engineering is to create autologous tissue grafts for future replacement therapies through utilization of cells and biomaterials simultaneously. Bio-printing is a novel technique, a growing field that is leading to the global revolution in medical sciences that has gained significant attention. Bio-printing has the potential to be used in producing human engineered tissues like bone and skin which then ultimately can be used in the clinics. In this paper, the 3D bio-printing applications of the engineered human tissues that are available (skin and bone) are reviewed. It is evident that various tissue engineering techniques have been applied in the fabrication of skin tissue; therefore, it leads to introduce tissue substitutes such as complementary, split-thickness skin graft, allografts, acellular dermal substitutes and cellularized graft-like commercial products, i.e., Dermagraft and Apligraf. Also, some bone scaffolds based on hydroxyapatite and biphasic calcium phosphate are available in the market. The technology of bio-printing has got validated for bone and skin tissue fabrication, and it is hoped that other tissues could be produced by this technique.