Cancer Cell Direct Bioprinting: A Focused Review

Abstract

Three-dimensional printing technologies allow for the fabrication of complex parts with accurate geometry and less production time. When applied to biomedical applications, two different approaches, known as direct or indirect bioprinting, may be performed. The classical way is to print a support structure, the scaffold, and then culture the cells. Due to the low efficiency of this method, direct bioprinting has been proposed, with or without the use of scaffolds. Scaffolds are the most common technology to culture cells, but bioassembly of cells may be an interesting methodology to mimic the native microenvironment, the extracellular matrix, where the cells interact between themselves. The purpose of this review is to give an updated report about the materials, the bioprinting technologies, and the cells used in cancer research for breast, brain, lung, liver, reproductive, gastric, skin, and bladder associated cancers, to help the development of possible treatments to lower the mortality rates, increasing the effectiveness of guided therapies. This work introduces direct bioprinting to be considered as a key factor above the main tissue engineering technologies.

Chitosan-Based Biomaterials: Insights into Chemistry, Properties, Devices, and Their Biomedical Applications

“…Within this framework, 3D printing, an additive manufacturing technology consisting of the LbL fabrication of 3D scaffolds with tunable sizes and geometries, programmed by means of computer-aided drafting (CAD), plays a relevant role as a promising tool for the replacement of damaged tissues. Differently from the off-of-shelf scaffold production or the common hydrogels scaffolds, 3D printing may allow the fabrication of novel 3D bioengineered tissue with promising properties [ 294 , 295 ].…”

The Variety of 3D Breast Cancer Models for the Study of Tumor Physiology and Drug Screening

“… Overview of cells and scaffold materials, which were used in spheroids or organoids (( a ), [ 104 ]), microfluidic systems (( b ), [ 50 , 105 ]) and 3D bioprinting (( c ), [ 106 , 107 ]) in BC research. The focus is on TME and bone metastasis.…”

“…Due to their good availability, they also dominate as materials in bioprinting. Lobo et al summarized the existing literature on bioprinting in BC and concluded that natural materials such as alginate, collagen, and derivatives were used more often (81.82%) than synthetic ones (18.18%) [ 107 ]. Natural biomaterials can be isolated from tissues and cells and include collagen, fibrin, alginate and chitosan.…”

“…Bioprinted tumor models can be generated by extrusion, inkjet, stereolithography-based bioprinting, laser-assisted and electrospinning-based bioprinting. The main 3D-printing technologies employed are extrusion (61.11%) and laser printing (16.67%) [ 107 ]. The respective techniques will not be described in this review, and the reader is referred to reviews dedicated to this topic, e.g., [ 106 , 146 , 147 ].…”

“…The overview ( Figure 4 c) of the cells used in bioprinting lists more BC cell lines and a greater variety of cell types included in the models than in BC spheroids. The majority of the screened articles (75.86%) used MDA-MB-231 and MCF-7 cells [ 107 ]. Natural and synthetic matrices are much more varied than those used in the other techniques.…”