Chapter 5. Shear Thinning Hydrogel-based 3D Tissue Modelling

Abstract

Hydrogels are water-swollen, crosslinked polymer networks that can be widely tuned to fit many applications. Hydrogels have been used as tissue engineering platforms for decades, but have not been widely adopted as inks for 3D bioprinting. Compared to the more common liquid solution phase (sol-phase) bioinks, hydrogel (gel-phase) bioinks have many advantages, which will be discussed in Section 1. Section 2 will describe how gel-phase inks can be tuned to include important bioactive cues for specific tissue engineering applications. In Section 3, different crosslinking strategies and materials will be presented for the creation of gel-phase bioinks. Finally, Section 4 will discuss how gel-phase bioinks can be used to create complex structures that are required for the future of advanced medicine.