A Surgical Robot for Intracorporeal Additive Manufacturing of Tissue Engineering Constructs

Abstract

The confluence of additive manufacturing (AM) based tissue engineering (TE), termed bioprinting, and robotic-assisted surgery (RAS) has the potential to increase the clinical adoption of regenerative medicine therapies by bioprinting inside the body. However, existing <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">in vivo</i> bioprinting systems are lacking in achievable structural complexity, defect access, or procedure invasiveness as they do not leverage the form factors of commercial RAS systems. Translating AM to RAS increases fluid pressures considerably, in turn increasing cell damage and decreasing cellular proliferation in TE constructs. Here, we describe Endoscopic AM, an intracorporeal bioprinting system that mimics the designs of commercial RAS systems and that has a novel endoscopic material metering system that produces cell pressures comparable to benchtop AM bioprinters. We present Endoscopic AM’s design, kinematics, fluid dynamics, and compare printing in a human body model to benchtop printing. We demonstrate intracorporeal printing is approximately 5 times less accurate than benchtop printing at this current design iteration, but that structure fidelity is sufficient for TE requirements.