{"doi":"10.1101/2023.11.18.567660","title":"Droplet bioprinting of acellular and cell-laden structures at high-resolutions","abstract":"Advances in Digital Light Processing (DLP) based (bio) printers have made printing of intricate structures at high resolution possible using a wide range of photosensitive bioinks. A typical setup of a DLP bioprinter includes a vat or reservoir filled with liquid bioink, which presents challenges in terms of cost associated with bioink synthesis, high waste, and gravity-induced cell settling, contaminations, or variation in bioink viscosity during the printing process. Here, we report a vat-free, low-volume, waste-free droplet bioprinting method capable of rapidly printing 3D soft structures at high resolution using model bioinks. A multiphase many-body dissipative particle dynamics (mDPD) model was developed to simulate the dynamic process of droplet-based DLP printing and elucidate the roles of surface wettability and bioink viscosity. Process variables such as light intensity, photo-initiator concentration, and bioink formulations were optimized to print 3D soft structures (∼0.4 to 3 kPa) with an XY resolution of 38 ± 1.5 μm and Z resolution of 237±5.4 μm. To demonstrate its versatility, droplet bioprinting was used to print a range of acellular 3D structures such as a lattice cube, a Mayan pyramid, a heart-shaped structure, and a microfluidic chip with endothelialized channels. Droplet bioprinting, performed using model C3H/10T1/2 cells, exhibited high viability (90%) and cell spreading. Additionally, microfluidic devices with internal channel network lined with endothelial cells showed robust monolayer formation while osteoblast-laden constructs showed mineral deposition upon osteogenic induction. Overall, droplet bioprinting could be a low-cost, no-waste, easy-to-use, method to make customized bioprinted constructs for a range of biomedical applications.","journal":"bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)","year":2023,"id":401644,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9563,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":1165009,"name":"Ujjwal Aryal","orcid":null,"position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1164562,"name":"Arun Poudel","orcid":"0000-0003-4899-7594","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1175296,"name":"Daniel Fougnier","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1165010,"name":"Zachary J. Geffert","orcid":null,"position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1164563,"name":"Rui Xie","orcid":"0000-0002-2857-7480","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1178608,"name":"Zhen Li","orcid":"0000-0002-0936-6928","position":6,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":349939,"name":"Pranav Soman","orcid":"0000-0001-9456-0030","position":7,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":351952,"name":"Puskal Kunwar","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":28,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:20:12.316631Z","pmid":"38014267","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}