Dr. Ge Gao received his Ph.D. at the Department of Mechanical Engineering in 2019 and worked as a postdoctoral fellow until 2020 at POSTECH in Korea. He joined Beijing Institute of Technology at the end of 2020 as an assistant professor and associated research fellow in the School of Medical Technology. His research focuses on novel 3D bioprinting strategies, formulation of innovative bioinks, building tissue/organ equivalents, in vitro disease modeling, and organ-on-a-chip for applications in regenerative medicine, analytics, and diagnostics. He has published over 40 peer-reviewed articles in top journals, including Nature Communications, Advanced Functional Materials, Biomaterials, and other high-impact journals. His h-index and citations are 20 and more than 2,600, respectively. He has received numerous awards including the Young Investigator Award (ICAM-BM 2018), the Chinese Government Award for Outstanding Self-financed Student Award, and the POSCO Asian Fellowship.

Topic title: Coaxial Bioprinting of Vascular Grafts and Disease Models

Abstract:

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of global death, which demands millions of bypass procedures every year to rescue patients. As the main precursor of CVD, atherosclerosis is a complex inflammatory disorder that still lacks clear pathological mechanisms and effective regenerative therapies. Hence, advanced tissue-engineering techniques are urgently needed to develop vascular bypass graft and disease models for clinical applications and physiopathology research. Coaxial bioprinting has emerged as a novel biofabrication strategy for the rapid tissue engineering of cell-laden tubular, fibrous, and core-shell spheroid constructs. Due to its unique advantage, this technique showed unparalleled potential for building living vasculatures. Combining with a vascular tissue-specific material formulated from decellularized extracellular matrix bioink, we have utilized the coaxial bioprinting technique to successfully fabricate a series of vascular constructs for both tissue regeneration and pathophysiology study, including (1) cell/drug-laden bio-blood-vessels for the recovery of ischemic disease, (2) endothelium/smooth muscle dual-layered blood vessels as small-diameter vascular grafts, (3) perfusable and functional vascular in vitro models that can recapitulate the physiopathology of endothelial tissue, (4) geometry-tunable artery equivalents to emulate the early-stage atherosclerotic events, and (5) developed atherosclerotic plaques for understanding the inflammatory pathogenesis. These achievements suggest that coaxial bioprinting is a promising biofabrication strategy that can leverage the strength of 3D bioprinting to build a variety of novel vascular constructs for matching the laboratory and clinical demands.