3D Printed Hydrogels for Ocular Wound Healing

Abstract

Corneal disease is one of the most significant causes of blindness around the world. Presently, corneal transplantation is the only way to treat cornea blindness. It should be noted that the amount of cornea that people donate is so much less than that required (1:70). Therefore, scientists have tried to resolve this problem with tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Fabricating cornea with traditional methods is difficult due to their unique properties, such as transparency and geometry. Bioprinting is a technology based on additive manufacturing that can use different biomaterials as bioink for tissue engineering, and the emergence of 3D bioprinting presents a clear possibility to overcome this problem. This new technology requires special materials for printing scaffolds with acceptable biocompatibility. Hydrogels have received significant attention in the past 50 years, and they have been distinguished from other materials because of their unique and outstanding properties. Therefore, hydrogels could be a good bioink for the bioprinting of different scaffolds for corneal tissue engineering. In this review, we discuss the use of different types of hydrogel for bioink for corneal tissue engineering and various methods that have been used for bioprinting. Furthermore, the properties of hydrogels and different types of hydrogels are described.

Keywords

• 3D bioprinting
• ocular wound healing
• scaffold-based hydrogels
• bioink