Faina Bider

Master student

Modification of alginate based hydrogels for biofabrication

 

Supervisor: Emine Karakaya, Prof. Aldo R. Boccaccini

3D bio-printing (biofabrication) is an additive manufacturing method that uses bioinks to create cell laden scaffolds layer by layer. Alginate based hydrogels are one of the
most commonly used bioinks due to the low cost, biocompatibility and tunable
properties [1]. The natural polysaccharide is oxidized to alginate-di-aldehyde (ADA) to
overcome the poor cell-adhesion and to chemically bind arginyl-glycyl-aspartic acid
(RGD) containing components. In addition to gelatine other biopolymers can be used
to introduce RGD containing components to the hydrogel. One of the goals of this
project is to characterize numerous combinations of ADA-biopolymer hydrogels and to
establish a well characterised hydrogel librar useful to select bioinks for biofabrication applications.
Furthermore, alginate based hydrogels can be used as drug delivery systems to enable the controlled release of phytotherapeutics. Therefore, another aim of this project is the encapsulation of different phytotherapeutic agents for drug release studies.

[1] B. Sarker et al., “Fabrication of alginate-gelatin crosslinked hydrogel microcapsules and evaluation of the microstructure and physico-chemical properties,” J. Mater. Chem. B, vol. 2, no. 11, pp. 1470–1482, 2014.