23. Towards Effective and Efficient Biofabrication Technologies

The artificial production, in laboratories, of biological structures and even complete organs, by adequately placing and combining ex vivo cells, synthetically produced tissue patches and supporting biomaterials, including but not limited to tissue engineering scaffolds, is no more a matter of science fiction but a present relevant research challenge already providing promising results, included under an innovative area called “biofabrication”. If larger biological structures and complete organs could be synthetically obtained, patients would benefit from more rapid surgical interventions, compatibility would be highly promoted, as they would be produced ex vivo from the own patient’s cells, and aspects such as organ piracy would be limited. It is important to highlight that nowadays around 10 % of organs used for transplantation worldwide comes from illegal activities. The socio-economical impact of synthetic organ production is comparable to that of the whole pharmaceutical industry, what explains the interest it has arisen in the last decades, with several new companies and research centres worldwide aiming at improving state-of-the-art tissue engineering procedures for starting 3D tissue construction and organ biofabrication. In addition novel scientific journals and book series are being devoted to these advances and related concepts and techniques are starting to be included in the syllabuses of teaching programs at universities, what will for sure be very positive for the evolution of this area. This chapter provides a brief introduction to this field of research, discussing most relevant advances on materials science, design tools and manufacturing technologies that being combined for making biofabrication a viable alternative to conventional therapeutic procedures. Main present difficulties and remarkable research challenges are also discussed. It constitutes an updated version of “Chap. 14: Biofabrication: Main advances and Challenges” from Springer’s “Handbook on Advanced Design and Manufacturing Technologies for Medical Devices” also by Andrés Díaz Lantada (Díaz Lantada 2013).