Academic vs industry perspectives in 3D bioprinting

Reviews of the scientific literature afford the opportunity to summarize critical concepts in a field; these publications can be extremely helpful for novice readers and can help rapidly build an understanding of the state of the art. While almost all reviews summarize their topic, few offer a critical opinion of their field. Even fewer provide a perspective on the future direction of the field, i.e., what important questions remain unanswered, which questions are the most crucial to answer immediately, etc. APL Bioengineering recently introduced the “Perspective” manuscript format where we seek the opinion of thought leaders in their fields as to their answers for these critical questions. While Perspectives on a subject can be helpful, they offer only one opinion. Yet in the course of academic discussions, viewpoints from multiple sides can get muddled or lost, especially if they originate in different fields or via non-academic partners including biotechnology and other industries. In that sense, single Perspective pieces may not present the full range of opinions. In an effort to bridge this divide in topic areas for APL Bioengineering, we are launching a periodic “Viewpoints” series, where we present a point vs counterpoint discussion on a rapidly developing area in bioengineering, aiming to specifically highlight and provide a forum where both positions can be succinctly summarized and argued. While we intend for this debate to be robust with the manuscripts published in our Viewpoints series by APL Bioengineering, they are not meant to be finite; we anticipate that this point vs counterpoint series will serve as a “launching pad” for each topic area covered.