BACKGROUND: The primary objective of Tissue engineering is a regeneration or replacement of tissues or organs damaged by disease, injury, or congenital anomalies. At present, Tissue engineering repairs damaged tissues and organs with artificial supporting structures called scaffolds. These are used for attachment and subsequent growth of appropriate cells. During the cell growth gradual biodegradation of the scaffold occurs and the final product is a new tissue with the desired shape and properties. In recent years, research workplaces are focused on developing scaffold by bio-fabrication techniques to achieve fast, precise and cheap automatic manufacturing of these structures. Most promising techniques seem to be Rapid prototyping due to its high level of precision and controlling. However, this technique is still to solve various issues before it is easily used for scaffold fabrication. In this article we tested printing of clinically applicable scaffolds with use of commercially available devices and materials. Research presented in this article is in general focused on "scaffolding" on a field of bone tissue replacement. RESULTS: Commercially available 3D printer and Polylactic acid were used to create originally designed and possibly suitable scaffold structures for bone tissue engineering. We tested printing of scaffolds with different geometrical structures. Based on the osteosarcoma cells proliferation experiment and mechanical testing of designed scaffold samples, it will be stated that it is likely not necessary to keep the recommended porosity of the scaffold for bone tissue replacement at about 90%, and it will also be clarified why this fact eliminates mechanical properties issue. Moreover, it is demonstrated that the size of an individual pore could be double the size of the recommended range between 0.2-0.35 mm without affecting the cell proliferation. CONCLUSION: Rapid prototyping technique based on Fused deposition modelling was used for the fabrication of designed scaffold structures. All the experiments were performed in order to show how to possibly solve certain limitations and issues that are currently reported by research workplaces on the field of scaffold bio-fabrication. These results should provide new valuable knowledge for further research.

Department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Czech Technical University Prague Technická 4 166 07 Prague 6 Czechia

Department of Mechanics Biomechanics and Mechatronics Faculty of Mechanical Engineering Czech Technical University Prague Technická 4 166 07 Prague 6 Czechia

Department of Stomatology 1st Faculty of Medicine Charles University and General University Hospital Prague Kateřinská 32 12801 Prague 2 Czechia

Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Czech Academy of Sciences Vídeňská 1083 14220 Prague 4 Czechia 2nd Faculty of Medicine Charles University 5 Úvalu 84 150 06 Prague 6 Czechia

Institute of Experimental Medicine of the Czech Academy of Sciences Vídeňská 1083 14220 Prague 4 Czechia Faculty of Science Charles University Albertov 6 12843 Prague 2 Czechia

University Centre for Energy Efficient Buildings Třinecká 1024 273 43 Buštěhrad Czechia

University of Veterinary and Pharmaceutical Sciencies Brno Palackého tř 1946 1 612 42 Brno Czechia

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