Tim Woodfield is Professor of Regenerative Medicine, Department of Orthopaedic Surgery & Musculoskeletal Medicine at University of Otago Christchurch and Director of the University of Otago Centre for Bioengineering & Nanomedicine. His research involves development of photo-crosslinkable bioinks and bioresins, 3D Bioprinting, spheroid bioassembly and additive manufacturing of medical devices applied to orthopaedics/regenerative medicine. He has >150 publications (h-index: 50) and obtained >NZ$28M in competitive research funding.

He has received a number of awards including a prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from the Royal Society of New Zealand Te Apärangi and the University of Otago Research Gold Medal. He received the 2020 Research Excellence Award from the Australasian Society for Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering (ASBTE), and was awarded Fellow Biomaterials Science & Engineering (FBSE) in 2020.

He is the current President of the International Society for Biofabrication, and former President of the Australasian Society for Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering. He is a member of the Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine International Society Asia Pacific Council (TERMIS-AP) and is an Executive Editorial Board member for Biofabrication journal, as well as Editorial Board Member for Advanced Healthcare Materials, APL Bioengineering and Associate Editor for Frontiers in Bioengineering & Biotechnology.

Topic title: Harnessing Cell-instructive Microenvironments for Scalable Biofabrication of Functional Tissues

Abstract:

Biofabrication technologies, including extrusion bioprinting, lithography bioprinting (DLP, VBP) and 3D bioassembly, are enabling generation of engineered constructs that replicate the complex 3D organization of native tissues via automated hierarchical placement of cell-laden bioinks, tissue modules, and/or bioactive factors. Our overall goals are to address major bottlenecks that still remain in designing materials that are both cell-instructive and compatible with high resolution additive manufacturing and 3D biofabrication techniques.

This presentation discusses alternative strategies to engineer highly tuneable hydrogel platforms that 1) promote a specific cell-instructive niche using light-activated crosslinking in gelatin-based bioinks, bioresins and high throughput modular spheroids, and 2) are printable across multiple biofabrication technologies, including extrusion-bioprinting, lithography-bioprinting and microfluidic-based bioprinting. We describe examples where we harness macromolecular chemistry to engineer cell-instructive tissue niches for multiple cell types and biofabrication technologies via: covalent incorporation of thiolated bioactives, nanocomposites, and di-tyrosine cross-linking of unmodified decellularized extracellular matrix (ECM), yielding enhanced chondrogenic, osteogenic differentiation and vascular network formation.

Expanding this approach, we describe further examples applying photocrosslinking to 3D bioassembly platforms for probing multicellular spheroid fusion kinetics, extracellular matrix ECM formation, and tissue-tissue integration mechanisms in healthy and diseased tissue spheroids, with specific examples of new paradigms for high-throughput screening and disease modelling.

Collectively, this work demonstrates the potential if using this cell instructive platform for advancing biofabrication and regenerative medicine towards clinical translation.