Biofabrication: a 21st century manufacturing paradigm (Biofabrication, 2009)

Mironov, V., Trusk, T., Kasyanov, V., Little, S., Swaja, R. & Markwald, R. (2009) Biofabrication: a 21st century manufacturing paradigm. Biofabrication doi:10.1088/1758-5082/1/2/022001

Reviewed and edited by New Harvest Journal Club’s John Nahay Christian Gainsley, respectively.

Abstract: Biofabrication can be defined as the production of complex living and non-living biological products from raw materials such as living cells, molecules, extracellular matrices, and biomaterials. Cell and developmental biology, biomaterials science, and mechanical engineering are the main disciplines contributing to the emergence of biofabrication technology. The industrial potential of biofabrication technology is far beyond the traditional medically oriented tissue engineering and organ printing and, in the short term, it is essential for developing potentially highly predictive human cell- and tissue-based technologies for drug discovery, drug toxicity, environmental toxicology assays, and complex in vitro models of human development and diseases. In the long term, biofabrication can also contribute to the development of novel biotechnologies for sustainable energy production in the future biofuel industry and dramatically transform traditional animal-based agriculture by inventing ‘animal-free’ food, leather, and fur products. Thus, the broad spectrum of potential applications and rapidly growing arsenal of biofabrication methods strongly suggests that biofabrication can become a dominant technological platform and new paradigm for 21st century manufacturing. The main objectives of this review are defining biofabrication, outlining the most essential disciplines critical for emergence of this field, analysis of the evolving arsenal of biofabrication technologies and their potential practical applications, as well as a discussion of the common challenges being faced by biofabrication technologies, and the necessary conditions for the development of a global biofabrication research community and commercially successful biofabrication industry.

Overview: Biofabrication can be narrowly defined as the production of complex biological products using living cells, molecules, extracellular matrices and engineered biomaterials”. The intent of this definition is to exclude those processes which create something which is the same as its component material.  According to this definition, the development of a fetus from a fertilized egg would fall into the category of biofabrication because the egg cells are manufacturing a living organism who is radically different than an equal mass of fertilized egg cells.  The authors acknowledge this fact by agreeing that synthetic biology and biofabrication overlap.

The authors claim their definition limits biofabricated products to living tissues or organs, rather than simple molecules.  Hence, they want their definition also to exclude technologies such as growing algae to produce relatively simple oils.

However, since the authors include an entire section on non-living cultured meat and leather as acceptable examples of biofabricated products, we infer that the authors’ definition does not imply that the complex biological products need to be living.

The authors also list challenges that the biofabrication industry face and engineering principles that biofabrication must involve.

They then lists a dozen technologies which fall into the category of biofabrication followed by ten applications of these technologies.  The section on animal-free meat biofabrication emphasizes five key elements for this technology:

1.  Using myoblasts or stem cells as a cell source.
2. Using affordable cell culture media
3. Using porous scaffold spheres such as collagen or chitosan
4. Using a perfusion bioreactor
5. Optimizing cell growth and differentiation conditions such as temperature and pressure

Notable Statistics: This paper did not cite significant statistics, as that was not its role. However, it is notable that the authors cite 120 references from a diverse set of peer-reviewed sources, including the journals Tissue Engineering, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, New England Journal of Medicine (Massachusetts Medical Society), Biomaterials (Elsevier), Journal of Biomedical Materials Research (Wiley), Journal of Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine (Wiley).