3D printing of concentrated emulsions into multiphase biocompatible soft materials.

3D printing via direct ink writing (DIW) is a versatile additive manufacturing approach applicable to a variety of materials ranging from ceramics over composites to hydrogels. Due to the mild processing conditions compared to other additive manufacturing methods, DIW enables the incorporation of sensitive compounds such as proteins or drugs into the printed structure. Although emulsified oil-in-water systems are commonly used vehicles for such compounds in biomedical, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic applications, printing of such emulsions into architectured soft materials has not been fully exploited and would open new possibilities for the controlled delivery of sensitive compounds.

3D Printing of Hierarchical Silk Fibroin Structures.

Like many other natural materials, silk is hierarchically structured from the amino acid level up to the cocoon or spider web macroscopic structures. Despite being used industrially in a number of applications, hierarchically structured silk fibroin objects with a similar degree of architectural control as in natural structures have not been produced yet due to limitations in fabrication processes. In a combined top-down and bottom-up approach, we exploit the freedom in macroscopic design offered by 3D printing and the template-guided assembly of ink building blocks at the meso- and nanolevel to fabricate hierarchical silk porous materials with unprecedented structural control.

Silk fibroin scaffolds with inverse opal structure for bone tissue engineering.

How scaffold porosity, pore diameter and geometry influence cellular behavior is-although heavily researched - merely understood, especially in 3D. This is mainly caused by a lack of suitable, reproducible scaffold fabrication methods, with processes such as gas foaming, lyophilization or particulate leaching still being the standard. Here we propose a method to generate highly porous silk fibroin scaffolds with monodisperse spherical pores, namely inverse opals, and study their effect on cell behavior.

Injectable materials with magnetically controlled anisotropic porosity.

We propose a method to create aligned porosity in injectable materials by using magnetically responsive microrods as pore forming sacrificial templates. Rod alignment occurs through the application of an external magnetic field after injecting the material into the desired end location. Removal of the sacrificial templates through dissolution or resorption generates porosity in deliberately tuned orientations after injection, offering a powerful method to design the porous architecture of injectable materials.