Executive Summary : | Recently, the area of bone tissue engineering is engaged in developing the prosthetic implants which can regenerate new tissue at the defect site. In this perspective, the compositional, architectural, and piezoelectric properties resemblance of prosthetic scaffolds with that of the living bone has been realized among the novel approaches. The natural living bone is a nano-composite, consisting of HA nanoplates, reinforced within collagen fibers matrix towards their longitudinal direction which provides an exceptional mechanical performance to bone. It is known that the piezoelectricity in living bone plays a key role in regulating the number of its metabolic activities. There is possibility to induce piezoelectricity in HA nanoplates due to presence of OH dipolar group along z-axis in it’s structure. Therefore, the development of HA nanoplates/collagen nanocomposite scaffolds can provide the architectural resemblance with living bone alongwith the compositional and piezoelectric response. The scaffolds, developed with the conventional molding methods are associated with number of inadequacies, such as difficulty in producing the patient’s specific defect architecture, lack in mimicking the native tissue architectures and native microenvironment for cells, limited area availability for cell growth, dearth of cell printing facility, and possibility of only 2D cell seeding technique on scaffold. Such 2D cell seeding technique does not allow the homogeneous distribution of cells and biomolecules within scaffolds as well as having difficulty to position the different cell types within scaffold at specified region. In the view of above, the present proposal aims to develop 3D bioprinted live scaffolds, composed of HA nanoplates reinforced alginate-collagen nanocomposites along with cells using 3D bioprinting technique, which can overcome the limitations associated with conventional molding, 2D cell seeding as well as 3D printing techniques. The different compositions of bioink will be prepared by the combination of HA nanoplates, sodium alginate and type 1 collagen with varying concentrations. The cell laden bioink will be loaded on printer syringe and then extruded with layer by layer positioning of bioink on petri dish. The composition and consequent viscosity of bioink, syringe pressure, printing temperature, printing speed, nozzle size, and angle and thickness of each layer will be optimized to obtain the bone mimicking piezoelectric, architecture and composition of developed 3D bioprinted HA nanoplates/alginate-collagen nanocomposite scaffolds. It is expected that such 3D bioprinted scaffolds will provide a feasible environment for normal cell functioning i.e., growth, proliferation and differentiation etc. which will subsequently make the HA nanocrystals-based piezoelectric scaffold as a promising next-generation material for bone tissue engineering applications. |