Bone-derived dECM/alginate bioink for fabricating a 3D cell-laden mesh structure for bone tissue engineering

Abstract Alginate bioink has been widely employed to fabricate 3D cell-laden structures because of its low toxicity, appropriate biocompatibility, and easy/fast cross-linking ability. However, the low bioactivity of the hydrogel is a main shortcoming, so that physical or chemical modification with bioactive components is a promising strategy to efficiently increase the biological activity of alginate hydrogel. The present study proposes a new method to obtain bioactive alginate-based bioink by supplementing it with methacrylated (Ma)-decellularized extracellular matrix (dECM) derived from bone tissues. We demonstrate that the appropriate processing conditions and concentration of Ma-dECM in the bioink offer not only reasonable printability for fabricating 3D cell-laden structures, but also meaningful cell viability of the printed cell-laden construct. Moreover, the biologically improved microenvironment of alginate-based cell-laden structures formed using our method demonstrated a substantial effect on the osteogenic differentiation of the human adipose derived stem cells that were laden in the bioink.