Break

Mimicking lymph tissue is challenging, yet crucial for understanding cell-mediated immune responses, and translating into clinical immunotherapy treatments. The 3D bioprinting technology is emerging for creating in-vivo like scaffolds as extracellular matrices, allowing spatial arrangement and 3D tissue culture of cells. However, existing bioinks still rely on crosslinkers and chemical modifications to produce printable bioinks, particularly for most biocompatible collagen materials. The chemical crosslink and modifications can introduce toxicity and unwanted cell-matrix interactions. Thus, we proposed the natural starch material to blend with collagen as a novel, non-toxic 3D bioink. We systematically investigated the rheological behavior of starch under different concentrations and gelation heating temperatures. We also studied the mixture ratio with collagen for developing the 3D printability. The optimized rheology is correlated with 3D printing shape fidelity, which leads to a new, non-chemically crosslinked collagen bioink. We also evaluated the biocompatibility of this bioink using MTT assay. The cell viability with our developed bioink scaffold showed good consistency with biocompatible collagen materials. This study introduces a new class of 3D bioink which could advance 3D tissue engineering and facilitate fast growing of immunotherapy treatment strategy.