Event Recap: The 3D Bioprinting Frontier

Category: Blog,Healthcare 3D Printing Community

Jul 28, 2025

At our latest 3DHEALS event, we had the opportunity to catch up with four incredible leaders in the field to discuss the jaw-dropping technology they have been developing. While they employ different methods to print, the goal remains the same: to push the boundaries of the shapes and materials that can be printed. Join us as we recap the innovative printing designs they shared, including the use of light to redefine drug discovery through bioprinted vascular models, FRESH printing for an artificial pancreas ready for clinical trials, a tomography method that prints entire structures in seconds, and the state-of-the-art Puredyne bioprinter for hassle-free experimentation. You can also watch the event on-demand at 3DHEALS Courses now.

The future of drug testing starts with a voxel of light.

Personalization is at the core of 3D printing. We envision a future where personalized tissue models open new doors for rapidly screening therapies to find the right drug for a specific patient, all before they take a single pill. Innovators like Dr. Karolina Valente are bringing us one step closer to this paradigm shift in the way we test drugs.

Dr. Valente, CEO and CSO of VoxCell BioInnovation, states that we’ve already seen a shift in market and regulatory trends, particularly with the FDA Modernization Act 2.0 in 2022, which encourages the adoption of alternatives to animal testing, such as bioprinting, AI, and other technologies. This optimistic shift in regulatory perspective is driving her company’s work to create bioprinted vasculature models that can test the way that novel drugs flow through blood vessels and affect tissues, all in vitro.

Equipped with one of the highest resolution printers out there, the company uses two-photon polymerization to shine voxels of light on curable bioink, creating blood vessel structures down to less than 1 micron in diameter. They’ve shown that they can achieve greater than 80% cell viability and tissues lasting for 21 days, with research underway to extend it to a month.

The big challenge for the field now is capturing patient-specific biology in these models. Alongside the vascular networks, such models could one day mimic a patient’s specific cellular microenvironment, enabling more precise and targeted treatments for diseases such as cancer, where cellular cues and genetic mutations can differ from patient to patient. Until this level of specificity is reached, 3D printing still has much to do to embody the personalization that it promises.

Making this approach more personalized is on Dr. Valente’s mind. Still, until that day comes, she’s already making strides creating tissue models that incorporate the immune system, computational simulations that ensure blood flow within the networks is physiologically relevant, and universal bioinks that work for any printer type. It’ll take an entire ecosystem of products, computational software, and considerations to make the dream a reality, and the only way to start is to tackle it head-on.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2C1Rgm25Co

The path to human trials within 3 years: bioprinting for type 1 diabetes

It’s been years in the making. Now, clinical trials are only a step away for FluidForm Bio, a company that’s using 3D bioprinting to grow islet cells that produce insulin in the body as a cure for type 1 diabetes. Stemming from a landmark paper in 2015, the company’s use of freeform reversible embedding of suspended hydrogels, or FRESH, is paving the way for individuals to replace manual daily insulin injections with a more convenient artificial pancreas that is implanted right under the skin.

Mike Graffeo, CEO and Co-Founder of FluidForm Bio, describes how the company’s patented FRESH method, pioneered by Dr. Adam Feinberg’s lab at CMU, has been instrumental to their success. By directly injecting densely-packed cells and proteins into an aqueous solution without the use of extra artificial scaffolding material, they have been able to create islet cell constructs that encourage the growth of more extensive blood vessel networks than prints made using traditional methods. This abundant blood supply network is critical for islet cell survival, and, due to FRESH, can be grown naturally in the body without printing individual vessels.

The company has been developing methods to control the properties of the aqueous bath in which printing occurs, ensuring that the correct cellular cues are present for proper growth once the implant is placed in the body. For Graffeo, it’s essential that 3D printing encourages the development of dynamic cellular structures, rather than using printing with the intent of creating static vascular networks, which runs counter to how cells naturally grow and move.

FluidForm Bio exemplifies the success of striking the perfect balance between engineering and biology. As the hype around 3D bioprinting fades and realism comes into picture, innovators are thinking about how we can set the scene for biology to do the work for us rather than printing every intricate detail, such as tiny capillary vessels. Self-assembly of complex structures is a cornerstone of molecular biology, and 3D printing is the tool that will enable self-assembly to do the heavy lifting for us.

With successful studies showing that their FRESH implants restore normal blood sugar levels in diabetic mice, Graffeo predicts that their solution will be tested in human patients within the next 3 years and approved this decade. It’s certainly an ambitious goal, but it’s the passion and drive to do it that will see it through. Graffeo discussed FluidForm Bio’s beginnings on a recent 3DHEALS podcast, and it’s incredible to see how a meeting with now-CTO Dr. Adam Feinberg during their undergraduate years, combined with many years of continued dedication to realizing the potential of Dr. Feinberg’s work in saving patient lives, has culminated in a nearly trial-ready product.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JOHcYMsaVE]

Don’t blink! Bioprinting in less than 30 seconds with Readily3D

The fabrication of cell-laden structures at scale and with high reproducibility is one of the grand challenges of bioprinting. With numerous printing and environmental parameters at play, the field must effectively address the fact that small changes can have significant impacts on cell behavior and growth. For Dr. Jorge Madrid-Wolff, Application Scientist at Readily3D, light-based bioprinting is key to achieving quick turnaround times on experiments and driving rapid innovation.

Readily3D’s tomographic 3D printer uses 405 nm light that rotates around a vat containing photosensitive ink, projecting light patterns that solidify the ink and produce a printed 3D structure without the need for extrusion or layer-by-layer printing. Their printers can cure a variety of photopolymers, such as hydrogels, acrylics, and silicones, to encapsulate a wide range of cell concentrations. The exciting part is that printing is completed in under 30 seconds for millimeter-scale constructs.

The vast number of applications of their technology is truly astounding. Researchers at ETH Zürich have used Readily3D’s printers to create in vitro models of mammary ducts that successfully produce milk proteins, Joshua tree-inspired lattice houses for photosynthetic bacteria to perform carbon sequestration, and microfilament networks that guide cells to grow and align with one another.

Aside from the vast array of applications possible with such speeds, seconds-scale 3D bioprinting paves the way for studies involving a larger number of samples, enabling innovators to move beyond small sample sizes and gain a better understanding of the variability present in their experiments. The need for faster, on-demand printing has garnered significant attention, with several ARPA-H grants focusing on speed and scalability. Printers such as Readily3D’s will enable the testing of vast numbers of prints with different combinations of physical and morphological characteristics that can be used to create large datasets for training AI models to find optimal printing parameters.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obC1I8TLbWM]

Bringing printing to the masses

3D bioprinting has advanced significantly due to the spirit of designing and fabricating objects of our imagination, much like the adrenaline rush of hobby printing. For Annaliese Vojnich, Business Development and Technical Sales Manager at ViscoTec America, the company has found its strengths in empowering researchers and innovators with their Puredyne bioprinter, enabling individuals of a wide range of backgrounds to create the bioprints they desire. The printer is capable of printing with a wide variety of materials, has a simple plug-and-play design for inserting bioinks with cartridge-like printheads, and solves many issues experienced by printers such as inconsistent extrusion and temperature control.

What we hope to see in the next few years is the emergence of scalable, state-of-the-art bioprinters that all can utilize. The field can go far simply by leveraging the spirit that created it in the first place: collaboration, ideation, and the drive to make the impossible. And these platforms, as well as the ones we’ve seen from our other speakers, are enabling this creative spirit for the masses. It’s the sharing of technology and information that will bring new methods in bioprinting to fruition, and companies that create modular, easy-to-use platforms are bringing the future of this field to everyone’s doorstep.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kegyl8B38G0]

What we’re thinking

Bioprinting has undoubtedly reached new heights in the last few years. Still, several exciting challenges remain, especially in the need to create personalized tissue models, determine the right cellular cues to induce tissue and blood vessel self-assembly, and develop platforms that anyone can use to print at scale and incredible speeds. The energy of early-stage startups like VoxCell BioInnovation and the clinical trials that are within reach for FluidForm Bio is keeping the adrenaline levels of the field high. The versatility and ease of use of Readily3D and Puredyne printers are ushering in a new era, making 3D bioprinting a more accessible and feasible option for researchers and engineers worldwide. We’re excited to see what’s next, and we hope you are, too. Stay up-to-date with what’s to come by subscribing to the 3DHEALS newsletter and joining our events live.