Virtual and Physical Prototyping

3D bioprinting has become an increasingly popular strategy for producing tissues for a variety of applications for both academics and industry. For example, Aspect Biosystems – a Vancouver based biotechnology company – recently signed a $2.5 billion deal with Novo Nordisk to generate implantable therapeutic tissues. This process works in a manner similar to traditional 3D printing, but instead of extruding melted filament – it requires specialized bioinks capable of supporting cell survival and function. The resulting tissues can be used for screening drug targets, tools for surgical interventions, or as implantable therapeutics. The collection will cover recent advances in translating this exciting technology for the aforementioned applications with the overall scope of Virtual and Physical Prototyping. We are particularly interested in approaches for predicting if a design can be successfully bioprinted, machine learning approaches to optimize the bioprinting process, novel smart bioinks for use in this process, and synthetic biology approaches to 3D bioprinting.

We are looking for papers detailing different applications in the area of 3D bioprinting.

Potential areas of interest include:

• 3D bioprinting of clinically relevant tissue models for drug screening and for use as mimetics for practicing surgical interventions
• Bioprinting tissues for transplantation and the challenges in clinical translation
• Smart bioinks and novel materials for 3D/4D bioprinting
• Machine learning approaches for optimizing different parts of the bioprinting
• Artificial intelligence approaches for optimizing bioink design, tissue design, and analysis of bioprinted tissues
• New approaches to 3D bioprinting using synthetic biology
• 3D printing approaches to medical device design, prototyping and production

Keywords: Bioprinting; Bioinks; Regenerative Medicine; Machine Learning

All manuscripts submitted to this Article Collection will undergo a full peer-review; the Guest Advisor for this collection will not be handling the manuscripts (unless they are an Editorial Board member). Please review the journal scope and author submission instructions prior to submitting a manuscript.

The deadline for submitting manuscripts is August 31, 2024.

Please contact Zhan Yu at [email protected] with any queries and discount codes regarding this Article Collection.

Please be sure to select "3D Bioprinting: Recent Trends and Advances" from the drop-down menu in the submission system.

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Dr. Stephanie Willerth is a Full Professor in Biomedical Engineering at the University of Victoria where she has dual appointments in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the Division of Medical Sciences. She also holds an appointment with the School of Biomedical Engineering at the University of British Columbia. She runs an internationally recognized research group in 3D bioprinting functional human tissue models. She founded the start-up company - Axolotl Biosciences which sells high quality bioinks for bioprinting human tissue models. She is an active member of the steering committee of the B.C. Regenerative Medicine Initiative and the Stem Cell Network. She was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars and Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. awarded her their Teaching Award of Excellence in 2021. She is also a Fellow of the Canadian Society of Senior Engineers.

Dr. Bosco Yu obtained his PhD at the University of Cambridge with a research focus on structural mechanics. He was a Croucher scholar and a fellow of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (a society for promoting scientific inquiry). Following a post-doc at the University of Toronto, he worked at McMaster University as an Assistant Professor.  Dr. Yu joined the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Victoria in September 2022 as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Yu's research group ("Hybrid 3D") leverages the power of additive manufacturing to develop novel materials with nature-inspired architectures. Taking inspiration from both organic and inorganic structures, we seek to create architected materials that are optimized for specific design challenges in a variety of applications. Many of Dr. Yu's ongoing research projects are related to biomedical applications: the design of porous surgical implants to enhance bone integration and avoid stress shielding; the geometrical design of bioresorbable stents to reduce the risk of thrombosis; the design the architecture of 3D printed crushable materials for injury prevention applications. In 2023, Dr. Yu received the New Materials Educator Award at the American Society for Engineering Education.

Dr. Sravya Tekumalla is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Victoria, Canada. She holds a PhD in Materials Science from National University of Singapore (NUS) is a recipient of NTU Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship & Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship. She works in the area of metal additive manufacturing, microstructure and crystallographic texture control and structure-property correlations of additively manufactured metallic materials. To date, she has authored 1 book, 3 book chapters, and published over 50 scientific articles in international top-tier peer-reviewed journals and conferences in the field of metallic materials.

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