Engineering functional skin constructs: A quantitative comparison of three-dimensional bioprinting with traditional...

Area of Science:

• Tissue Engineering
• Biomaterials Science
• Regenerative Medicine

Background:

• Human skin equivalents are crucial for research and therapy.
• Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting offers advantages like scalability and on-demand production.
• The quality of 3D bioprinted skin compared to manually produced skin remains unassessed.

Purpose of the Study:

• To evaluate the structural and functional similarity of 3D bioprinted human skin equivalents to traditionally produced ones.
• To assess the impact of printing-induced shear stress on cellular and tissue-level characteristics.

Main Methods:

• Development of four bilayered skin equivalents: non-printed/non-printed (NN), printed/printed (PP), printed epidermis/non-printed dermis (PN), and non-printed epidermis/printed dermis (NP).
• Characterization at cellular level: keratinocyte colony-forming efficiency (CFE) and fibroblast collagen gel contraction.
• Characterization at tissue level: histological and immunohistochemical analysis (epidermal basal cell count, thickness, filaggrin, claudin-1).

Main Results:

• No significant differences in keratinocyte CFE or fibroblast collagen gel contraction were observed between printed and non-printed groups.
• Histological and immunohistochemical analyses revealed no significant differences in epidermal basal cell count, thickness, filaggrin, or claudin-1 expression.
• All four developed skin equivalents demonstrated comparable structural and functional properties.

Conclusions:

• 3D bioprinting technology can produce human skin equivalents of comparable quality to traditional methods.
• This validates 3D bioprinting for high-throughput industrial and clinical applications in tissue engineering.
• The study overcomes previous limitations by demonstrating the efficacy of 3D bioprinting for skin construct development.