The present work is targeted to shortening of rehabilitation time and life quality improvement of the patients with bone tissue diseases through implementation of personalized tissue-engineered methodology and lab-on-the-chip technologies. Bone damage due to either pathology or trauma is very common. Its repair involves costly medical and/or surgical intervention, several human resources and a great deal of suffering for the patients: in many cases, tissue grafts are required to achieve functional recovery. Moreover, the presently available grafting techniques are only partially successful, and this is due to both the length and cost of the treatment as much as to the shortage of donor bone tissue. Tissue engineering approaches represent an effective alternative means of repair for bone damage and would provide a high social benefit. Tissue engineering approaches are foreseen as the use of scaffolding material in combination osteogenic factors. Personalized tissue-engineered systems for tissue engineering must ensure high quality, reliability, sustainability and cost-effectiveness of the individual’s life, providing a new, advanced level of the medical assistance in therapy and surgery. The task of obtaining a set of guiding design principles for scaffold design is clearly difficult because multiple stimuli are often operating simultaneously. A personalized approach based on additive manufacturing, i.e. three-dimensional printing, will help to provide a treatment option for bone defects based on the individual anatomical properties of the patient. The current work presents a novel, simplified concept of designing anatomically shaped bone constructs. This will allow for solving the inverse problem of designing a complex three-dimensional architecture for bone scaffolds, i.e. the problem of machining porous structures from bulk material. This approach allows to program the fabrication of the particular bone-mimicking architectures of the scaffolds that provide an optimal environment for a facilitated and faster “critical size” bone healing. Thus, this proposed state-of-the-art approach serves as most promising option for the successful solution in “critical size defects” in bone tissue engineering. It provides the opportunity to design the bone construct to adequately mimic the patient’s anatomy.
This lecture is addressed of the own work related to the development and optimization of three-dimensional printing processes to fabricate novel scaffolds and the overview of technology for fabrication of cell-based bone repair and diagnostics systems (lab-on-the-chip technologies).