Advances in additive manufacturing for bone tissue engineering: materials, design strategies, and applications

The growing annual demand for bone grafts and artificial implants emphasizes the need for effective solutions to repair or replace injured bones. Additive manufacturing technology offers unique merits for advancing bone tissue engineering (BTE), enabling the creation of scaffolds and implants with customized shapes and designs, interconnected architecture, controlled mechanical properties and compositions, and broadening its range of applications. It overcomes the limitations of traditional manufacturing methods such as electrospinning, salt leaching, freeze drying, solvent casting etc. This review highlights additive manufacturing technologies and their applications in BTE, as well as materials and scaffold architectures to widen the potential of the biomedical sector. The selection of optimal printing methods for BTE requires careful consideration of the advantages and disadvantages against the needs for degradation, strength, and biocompatibility. Material extrusion and powder bed fusion techniques are the most widely used additive manufacturing processes in BTE. The comprehensive review also revealed that parametric designs such as triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS) and Voronoi hold better characteristics for their application in BTE. Voronoi designs exhibit exceptional randomness whereas TPMS structures feature high permeability with continuous surfaces. Topology optimized and gradient models exhibited superior physical and mechanical properties compared to uniform lattices. Future research should focus on the development of novel biomaterials, multi-material printing, assessing long-term impacts, and enhancing 3D printing technologies.