From Vision to Reality: Strategies for Functional Vascularization in Bioprinted Artificial Organs

Since the advent of 3D printing decades ago, the vision of mass-producing custom bioprinted artificial organs to replace diseased ones has captivated researchers. However, this goal remains elusive due to significant biological and engineering hurdles, with the lack of effective organ-level vascularization being a primary bottleneck.

Recent advances in bioimaging and biofabrication have provided new opportunities to overcome these existing challenges. In bioimaging, various optical devices have been developed for the quantitative assessment of vascular perfusion and oxygenation. Concurrently, in biofabrication, diverse top-down and bottom-up strategies have been explored to construct functional vascular architectures across multiple scales. Despite these promising efforts, achieving 3D fabrication of perfusable and regenerative vascular networks within large tissue volumes still presents formidable last-mile challenges.

Dr. Xu is Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Professor of Precision Instrumentation and Deputy Director of Key Lab for Multimodal Digital Twin Technology at Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research (SIAR) of University of Science and Technology of China (USTC). Before joining USTC as a faculty member, he had been a tenured faculty member at The Ohio State University for over ten years. Dr. Xu’s teaching and research interests include microfluidics and microencapsulation, 3D printing, multimodal imaging, and AI+devices. He has carried out 10+ clinical trials, published 40+ patents, and authored 200+ research papers in the field.