Elisa Weise

Former master student

Calcium-based pre-crosslinking of ADA-Gel bioinks for 3D bioprinting to enhance printability and cell viability

 

Supervisors: Jonas Roeder, Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini

Alginate-based bioinks are widely used for 3D biofabrication. Nevertheless, the lack of shape fidelity directly after the printing process before final crosslinking limits the complexity of the printable structures [1]. An approach to overcome this issue is pre-crosslinking the hydrogel with homogeneously distributed CaCO3 particles. Even though this approached already showed promising results, a main problem is the pH-decrease inherent in the process which is suspected to have a negative influence on encapsulated cells [2]. The goal of this Master thesis is to overcome this issue by using alternative Ca containing nanoparticles to pre-crosslink ADA-Gel hydrogels and investigate their printability. Since this approach is expected to be less stressful for the embedded cells, cell studies will be conducted with human fibroblasts additionally to mouse cells.

[1] M. Temirel, S.R. Dabbagh, S. Tasoglu, Journal of Functional Biomaterials 13 (2022).

[2] J. Hazur, R. Detsch, E. Karakaya, J. Kaschta, J. Teßmar, D. Schneidereit, O. Friedrich et al., Biofabrication 12 (2020) 45004.