INKplant

Improving the life quality of Europe’s increasingly elderly population is one of the most pressing challenges oursociety faces today. The need to treat age-related degenerative changes in e.g. articular joints or dental implantswill boost the market opportunities for tissue regeneration products like biological scaffolds. State of the art 3Dprinting technologies can provide biocompatible implants with the right macroscopic shape to fit a patient-specifictissue defect. However, for a real functionality, there is a need for new biomaterials, technologies and processesthat additionally allow the fabrication of a scaffold microstructure that induces tissue-specific regeneration. It is notpossible to address the complexity in structure and properties of human tissues with a single material or fabricationtechnique. Besides, there are many types of tissue in the human body, each with their own internal structures andfunctions. INKplant vision is the fusion/combination of different biomaterials (6 different inks), high-resolution, highthroughput additive manufacturing technologies already proved for industrial processes (ceramic sterolithographyand 3D multimaterial inkjet printing), and advanced simulation and biological evaluation, to bring a new concept forthe design and fabrication of biomimetic scaffolds (3D printed patient specific resorbable cell-free implants) whichcan address the complexity of the different tissue in the human body, demonstrated for 2 Use Cases. For a successfulfuture translation, INKplant will consider all the relevant clinical adoption criteria already at the beginning of thedevelopment process. To address INKplant challenging objective the consortium includes the best expertise from themain areas of relevance to the project: biomaterials, 3D printing technology, tissue engineering, regulatory bodies andsocial humanities.