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3D Bioprinting

Edited by: Paul van Zuijlen, Maling Gou

A burn wound trauma can be devastating to the human body. It poses a challenge for the doctors to save the life of patients and to reconstruct damaged body structures. Decades ago an extensive burn trauma almost certainly would lead to death. This called for many innovations. Because all these developments patients nowadays survive their burn injuries and extensive wounds can be closed. Now we arrived in the era of ’scar quality’. We are dealing with extensive scars that our predecessors never saw. Also we want to restore ‘quality of life’. 

3D printing is a new innovative technique with many interesting possibilities that now is changing the world around us. It already led to innovations that we could not think of a decade ago. It will also affect the way we will treat burn patients. In its simplest form it can be used for the preparation of splints and collars for the treatment of contractures and hypertrophic scars. But in combination with tissue engineering it can used for skin and cartilage engineering of missing body parts.   

This thematic series covers many interesting aspects the possibilities (and impossibilities) of 3D printing for burn care.

This series was published in Burns & Trauma

  1. Mammary progenitor cells (MPCs) maintain their reproductive potency through life, and their specific microenvironments exert a deterministic control over these cells. MPCs provides one kind of ideal tools for ...

    Authors: Rui Wang, Yihui Wang, Bin Yao, Tian Hu, Zhao Li, Yufan Liu, Xiaoli Cui, Liuhanghang Cheng, Wei Song, Sha Huang and Xiaobing Fu
    Citation: Burns & Trauma 2019 7:29
  2. Burns are a significant cause of trauma, and over the years, the focus of patient care has shifted from just survival to facilitation of improved functional outcomes. Typically, burn treatment, especially in t...

    Authors: Mathew Varkey, Dafydd O. Visscher, Paul P. M. van Zuijlen, Anthony Atala and James J. Yoo
    Citation: Burns & Trauma 2019 7:4
  3. Material extrusion additive manufacturing has rapidly grown in use for tissue engineering research since its adoption in the year 2000. It has enabled researchers to produce scaffolds with intricate porous geo...

    Authors: Andrew Gleadall, Dafydd Visscher, Jing Yang, Daniel Thomas and Joel Segal
    Citation: Burns & Trauma 2018 6:19
  4. Extensive burns and full-thickness skin wounds are difficult to repair. Autologous split-thickness skin graft (ASSG) is still used as the gold standard in the clinic. However, the shortage of donor skin tissue...

    Authors: Peng He, Junning Zhao, Jiumeng Zhang, Bo Li, Zhiyuan Gou, Maling Gou and Xiaolu Li
    Citation: Burns & Trauma 2018 6:5