UC Irvine

Regenerative medicine and tissue engineering leverage applied science and engineering approaches to provide solutions for restoring, replacing, and maintaining the function of impaired tissues and organs. In tissue engineering, tissue-like constructs are manufactured through the combination of cells, bioactive molecules, and biocompatible scaffolds to mimic natural tissues and restore tissue function. Designing an effective scaffold necessitates coordinated strategies that couple biomaterial selection with compatible fabrication techniques.Current printability restrictions imposed on the pool of compatible biomaterials by advanced scaffold fabrication techniques potentially exclude ideal options for tissue-specific mimicry. The need for specialized fabrication equipment also serves as a “barrier to entry” in a field where a lack of sufficient funding is given as a common reason for failures in clinical translation. This dissertation presents the development of an accessible fabrication technique, leveraging coordinated injection molding strategies and indirect 3D printing, to produce 3D hydrogel constructs with programmable gradients in composition, architecture, and function. Our approach, referred to as fluidic infiltrative assembly (FIA), capitalizes on the printability bypass of indirect 3D printing, flow-defined heterogeneity from coordinated injection molding strategies, and commercially-available equipment/products to facilitate ongoing efforts in tissue scaffold development. This work also discusses the integration of FIA with a post-processing technique for inducing structural anisotropy in biopolymer networks to generate multi-dimensional, anisotropic gradients in a programmable manner. Though subject to limitations imposed by sacrificial materials, this accessible and versatile technique offers an alternative, cost-effective platform for tissue-specific, scaffold development.