Biofabrication: a secret weapon to advance manufacturing, economies, and healthcare.

Biofabrication is a revolutionary approach to healthcare that uses manufacturing processes to produce biomaterials, devices, cells, tissues, and organs. The core technology underlying biofabrication is 3D printing, or additive manufacturing—the same technology that has sparked advances in rapid prototyping through the additive manufacturing of polymer-based constructs. Biofabrication represents a variation on this theme, often described as 3D bioprinting, combining cells, biomaterials, and synthetic materials into biological constructs. Such constructs encompass a vast range of applications, including custom-made biomedical devices; microfluidic devices that incorporate 3D miniaturized organs called organoids for high-throughput drug and toxicity screening; tissue-engineered skin, cartilage, and bone; blood vessels and hollow organs such as the bladder; and even complex organs such as the kidney, liver, lung, and heart.This special issue of Trends in Biotechnology reviews many of these envisioned applications, or in cases where the translation of the technology remains hypothetical, gives opinions on their future potential. Some Opinion papers presented in this issue include those of Yeong and colleagues, who ask whether skin bioprinting is an impending reality or simply a fantasy; Visscher and colleagues, who foresee a biofabrication-based approach to craniofacial reconstruction using multiple tissue types; and Ozbolat and colleagues, who advocate the potential of bioprinting to overcome current limitations in 3D models for pharmaceutical testing. In addition, Rouwkema and Khademhosseini review the current applications of novel fabrication techniques to creating vasculature in engineered tissues.To realize the potential that biofabrication holds, manufacturing challenges need to be addressed. These manufacturing challenges are many, but there are central challenges that we believe the field can advance together, which will bring us one step closer to realizing the true benefits that biofabrication promises. Some of these central manufacturing challenges include (1) consistent, reliable, and multi-sourced starting materials for biofabrication (e.g., biomaterials, cells, and reagents); (2) coordinated standards and regulatory pathways for biomedical products; (3) advanced, modular, closed, and automated platform technologies for biofabication; and (4) quality-control systems integrated into the manufacturing process to ensure that biofabricated products are well defined, characterized, and aligned with regulatory standards.On the theme of manufacturing challenges, short articles by Knowlton and Tasoglu, and by Tamayol and colleagues, highlight some recent progress in biofabricated organs-on-chips and in biofabricated textile processing. In an Opinion, Wan poses the question of whether the advent of organoids has made a biomaterial-based approach to tissue engineering obsolete, while a Review by Picollet-D’hahan and colleagues discusses recent advances in fabricating flow-based organ models. Finally, Xu and colleagues describe how bioprinted constructs can evolve over time, in a process they term 4D bioprinting.Investments into realizing these diverse applications and overcoming the associated manufacturing challenges will yield tremendous returns in boosting economies across the world. We predict that countries that align funding efforts across private and government sectors to address and solve these manufacturing challenges will enjoy economic benefits of creating more jobs, as well as providing a new era of personalized medicine where off-the-shelf bioengineered products will become a reality. We hope this special issue inspires discussion and innovation throughout this exciting field and welcome your feedback at tibtech@cell.com.