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Updated: Jun 15, 2025

Microfluidic Bioprinting for Engineering Vascularized Tissues and Organoids
Published on: August 11, 2017
Rapid model-guided design of organ-scale synthetic vasculature for biomanufacturing
Zachary A Sexton1,2, Dominic Rütsche1,2, Jessica E Herrmann3
1Department of Bioengineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA.
Abstract:
Our ability to produce human-scale biomanufactured organs is limited by inadequate vascularization and perfusion. For arbitrarily complex geometries, designing and printing vasculature capable of adequate perfusion poses a major hurdle. We introduce a model-driven design platform that demonstrates rapid synthetic vascular model generation alongside multifidelity computational fluid dynamics simulations and three-dimensional bioprinting. Key algorithmic advances accelerate vascular generation 230-fold and enable application to arbitrarily complex shapes. We demonstrate that organ-scale vascular network models can be generated and used to computationally vascularize >200 engineered and anatomic models. Synthetic vascular perfusion improves cell viability in fabricated living-tissue constructs. This platform enables the rapid, scalable vascular model generation and fluid physics analysis for biomanufactured tissues that are necessary for future scale-up and production.

