Additive processing of biopolymers for medical applications

Abstract In recent years, there has been a demand for developing bioartificial organs/tissues, drug delivery systems, and medical devices. The primary challenge toward clinical applications is difficult to scale up to complex, biologically effective tissues and organs to the size relevant for humans. The conventional fabrication process has been used to generate engineered scaffolds of foam-like internal structure with a random architecture and limited control of scale. However, in tissue engineering, there is a requirement for structures that can bond cell growth and also support the physiological environment such as geometrical, topographical, and physical features of the targeted applications. Even though such processing techniques are fast, scalable, and economical, they have their limitations such as dimensional control on microarchitectures such as pore size and geometry and their interconnections and distributions with the structures. To conquer these difficulties in developing three-dimension structures for medical necessities, recently, the researchers propelled toward 3D printing as a rapid prototyping technique to fabricate controlled meso- and microlevel porous structures of any desired complexities. This chapter presents a state-of-the-art of biocompatible polymers and polymer-based composites by additive manufacturing process to the manufacturing of biomedical applications and then listing the current biomaterials used in these composites and the mixing process. Finally, we report the future development of producing medical devices and implants using 3D printing technology.