Research Projects

3D bioprinting has recently emerged as an innovative and revolutionary biomanufacturing technique providing new opportunities to construct biomedical devices, tissues scaffolds and even live organs towards tissue engineering and regenerative medicines. However, the field is still in its nascent stage. The major bottle neck lies to the scarcity of diverse ink materials with both biomimicry and manufacturability with tunable opportunities as per the requirement of either hard or soft tissues scaffolds. This proposed project work is in perfect tune to meet such challenges and burgeoning demand of biomimetic synthetic ink materials with desired rheological, mechanical and biocompatible properties. A series of novel ink materials involving unique formulation mechanisms will be synthesized based on synthetic biocompatible polymeric hydrogels, and their physico-chemical properties will be optimized in order to achieve excellent printability with broad printing window. The fabricated complex scaffolds are anticipated to exhibit excellent shape fidelity, via microstructure testing, rheological studies, mechanical testing and cell viability analysis in vitro. Note that only a handful researchers globally are currently working on the field of 3D bioprinting, and therefore the development of such synthetic prominent bioink materials can be used as a toolbox for material scientists and bioengineers, in turn can promote the clinical applications of 3D bioprinting.