Challenges and opportunities in generating microvasculature using bioprinting techniques
Junjie Yu, Daiki Murata, Manabu Itoh, Koichi Nakayama · 2026
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Description
Yu and colleagues reviewed in 2026 methods for growing tiny blood vessels by bioprinting, meaning printing living tissue layer by layer. Engineered tissues fail without microvasculature, the fine vessel network that delivers blood inside them. The review surveys printing approaches for vessel structures and weighs what each does well and poorly.
Some methods print tubes with sacrificial inks that later wash out, leaving open channels. Others place cells so they self-assemble into vessel-like networks without any scaffold. The authors give special attention to the Kenzan method from their own lab, which skewers cell clusters on needle arrays to build scaffold-free tissue. The review closes with open challenges: making vessels that carry flow at body scale, and linking them to host vessels fast enough to keep grafts alive.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Junjie Yu, Daiki Murata, Manabu Itoh, Koichi Nakayama |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 44 KB |
| LICENSE | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |