High-Fidelity Printing Strategies for Printing 3D Vascular Hydrogel Structures

Vascularization arguably poses the most significant hurdle for the success of most biomaterials-based tissue engineering therapies. In this work, we report two printing strategies that permit the 3D Inkjet printing of fluorescent alginate hydro gels into overhanging structures and closed lumens that could serve as vessel mimetics. The first is 4-Matrix printing, where the order of droplet printing in each printing layer is optimized so that new droplets do not coalesce with un-gelled droplets on the surface. The second is the use of incremental droplet spacing to print overhanging and closed structures in order to reduce the degree of down-wall flow.