Development of a Multi-Arm Bioprinter for Hybrid Tissue Engineering

This paper highlights the development of a multi-arm bioprinter (MABP) capable of concurrent deposition of multiple materials with independent dispensing parameters including deposition speed, material dispensing rate and frequency for functional zonal-stratified articular cartilage tissue fabrication. The MABP consists of two Cartesian robots mounted in parallel on the same mechanical frame. This platform is used for concurrent filament fabrication and cell spheroid deposition. A single-layer structure is fabricated and concurrently deposited with spheroids to validate this system. Preliminary results showed that the MABP was able to produce filaments and spheroids with well-defined geometry and high cell viability. The resulting filament width has a variation of +/-170 μm and the center-to-center filament distance was within 100 μm of the specified distance. This fabrication system is aimed to be further refined for printing structures with varying porosities to mimic the natural cartilage structure in order to produce functional tissue-engineered articular cartilage using cell spheroids containing cartilage progenitor cells (CPCs).