Printing Collagen 3D Structures

Collagen is a biomaterial with an excellent biocompatibility due to its biodegradability and weak antigenicity. Its main applications in tissue engineering field are in burns -to accelerate wound healing-and drug delivery. Collagen gels and solutions are widely used for building scaffolds or three-dimensional cultures, some of them constructed by three-dimensional bioprinting. This work presents an adaptation of a protocol in order to isolate collagen from bovine tendon and also the development of a three-dimensional bioprinter. The preliminary results we preset are 3D structures constructed by the developed bioprinter, using the collagen obtained from bovine tendon, after application of the proposed protocol. These results are promising as they show the capability of the presented protocol to obtain collagen from bovine tendon and the potential of the bioprinting technique for building biocompatible three-dimensional structures designed by Computer Aided Design (CAD) or replicating anatomical structures from standard medical imagining studies. Further studies are needed in order to assess the mechanical and biochemical properties of the printed structures.