Do you know someone who suffered from a bone defect that had
problems to heal? The answer is probably yes since bone is the
second most commonly tissue transplanted worldwide and is
primarily used in bone defects that are unable to heal. In order to
develop a substitute material that guides bone formation and
stimulates bone repair without commonly reported side-effects such
as pain, infections and an enhanced immune response, this project
looks at mimicking bone on three sides (composition, architecture
and properties) and two scales (load-bearing scale of the scaffold
and the non-load bearing scale of the hydrogels). Dual core-shell 3D-printing will be used to fabricate the scaffold consisting of an osteogenic and an angiogenic filament. Characterisation will be performed to target the incorporation of the bone mimicking biophysical cues into the bone substitute material.