Vaskit
Vascular bioink
Generating a sufficient blood vessel system — vascularization — is a major challenge for bioprinting and engineering 3D tissues in vitro. Present in almost all in vivo tissues, this endothelial cell-coated tubular network is needed to ensure a constant flow of oxygen and nutrients inside 3D-bioprinted constructs. At CELLINK, we addressed this challenge by developing VasKit, a bioink designed to enable vascularization.
Products used:
Aim
The need for vascularization
One of the biggest challenges facing the bioprinting field is developing a way to supply cells with nutrients and drain their waste products. Until now, most methods didn’t involve any regulated exchange of metabolites — instead, they relied on the simple diffusion process that naturally occurs in cell culture medium.
While that can be sufficient for constructs with low-cell densities and thin geometries, dense tissues require a stable microvascular network to exchange nutrients and expel metabolic waste.