G Model ADDMA-123; No. of Pages 22 ARTICLE IN PRESS Additive Manufacturing xxx (2016) xxx–xxx Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Additive Manufacturing jou rnal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/addma Review Evaluation of bioprinter technologies a,b,c,d,∗ a,b a,b Ibrahim T. Ozbolat , Kazim K. Moncal , Hemanth Gudapati a Engineering Science and Mechanics Department, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 16802, United States b The Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 16802, United States c Materials Research Institute, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 16802, United States d Biomedical Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 16802, United States a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t Article history: Since the first printing of biologics with cytoscribing as demonstrated by Klebe in 1986, three dimensional Received 8 June 2016 (3D) bioprinting has made a substantial leap forward, particularly in the last decade. It has been widely Received in revised form used in fabrication of living tissues for various application areas such as tissue engineering and regen- 11 September 2016 erative medicine research, transplantation and clinics, pharmaceutics and high-throughput screening, Accepted 10 October 2016 and cancer research. As bioprinting has gained interest in the medical and pharmaceutical communi- Available online xxx ties, the demand for bioprinters has risen substantially. A myriad of bioprinters have been developed at research institutions worldwide and several companies have emerged to commercialize advanced bio- Keywords: Bioprinting printer technologies. This paper prefaces the evolution of the field of bioprinting and presents the first comprehensive review of existing bioprinter technologies. Here, a comparative evaluation is performed Bioprinting technologies Bioprinters for bioprinters; limitations with the current bioprinter technologies are discussed thoroughly and future Tissue and organ fabrication prospects of bioprinters are provided to the reader. © 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Contents 1. From 3D printing to bioprinting . 00 2. Bioprinter technologies . 00 2.1. Extrusion-based bioprinters . 00 2.1.1. Conventional extrusion-based bioprinters. .00 2.1.2. Extrusion-based bioprinters with higher degrees of motion freedom . 00 2.1.3. Extrusion-based bioprinters supporting bioplotting process. .00 2.1.4. Extrusion-based bioprinters supporting bioprinting of cell aggregates . 00 2.1.5. Extrusion-based bioprinters supporting other bioprinting modalities . 00 2.2. Droplet-based bioprinters. .00 2.2.1. Autodrop Compact and AD-P-8000 . 00 ® 2.2.2. MicroFab jetlab . .00 2.3. Laser-based bioprinters . 00 3. Limitations in bioprinter technologies . 00 3.1. Limited variety of the commercially available bioprinters . 00 3.2. Cartridge and nozzle design. .00 3.3. Size and speed of bioprinters . 00 3.4. Limited motion capabilities . 00 3.5. Lack of full automation . 00 3.6. High cost of bioprinting and bioprinters . 00 3.7. Low process resolution . 00 3.8. Lack of compatible bioink materials . 00 ∗ Corresponding author at: Engineering Science and Mechanics Department, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA, 16802, United States. E-mail address: [email protected] (I.T. Ozbolat). http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2016.10.003 2214-8604/© 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved. Please cite this article in press as: I.T. Ozbolat, et al., Evaluation of bioprinter technologies, Addit Manuf (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.addma.2016.10.003 G Model ADDMA-123; No. of Pages 22 ARTICLE IN PRESS 2 I.T. Ozbolat et al. / Additive Manufacturing xxx (2016) xxx–xxx 3.9. Progress in bioprinting and tissue engineering research . 00 3.10. Limited clinical translation . 00 4. Future outlook . 00 5. Conclusions . 00 Acknowledgements. .00 References . 00 1. From 3D printing to bioprinting of the first manufacturing institute (the National Additive Manufac- turing Innovation Institute) in the United States (US) in the area of Three dimensional (3D) printing has opened a revolutionary era 3D printing and additive manufacturing, use of 3D printing in bio- in medical product design and development and is widely used in logical research has escalated; enormous progress has been made in fabrication of custom-made anatomically-correct tissue scaffolds, the last four years, which has positively affected bioprinting tech- where biomaterials are deposited through a computer-controlled nology and research [21]. Since then, several spin-off companies dispensing system to specific points in 3D space [1,2]. Three- have emerged to commercialize breakthrough technologies world- dimensional printing is preferred when building engineered tissue wide. Recent approaches in hybrid vascularized tissue printing with.