New Bioprinted Fat Tissue Could Treat Burns, Foot Ulcers, and Sores, Say Korean Researchers

Bioprinting continues its steady march toward the ambitious goal of making new tissue and organs commonplace. Teams worldwide are specializing in hearts, spleens, and cartilage. Now, researchers from Korea’s Pusan National University have made progress in 3D printing adipose tissue, publishing their findings in Advanced Functional Materials.

Adipose tissue, commonly known as fat, is found in the body as visceral fat surrounding organs, in bones, and as subcutaneous fat in the skin. While 3D printing fat may not seem groundbreaking, adipose tissue is a major component of skin and could be instrumental in repairing, healing, and regenerating skin.

The team used a hybrid bioink to print adipose tissue with regenerative properties. They combined a decellularized extracellular matrix with alginate to create the ink, using a ratio of 1% adipose to 0.5% alginate. The printed structures more closely mimicked native tissue and lipid bodies. They then optimized printing settings and parameters, determining that ideal diameters were ≤ 600 µm and that tissues should be ≤ 1000 µm apart. Observations included wound healing and skin regeneration.

“Under standard culture conditions, preadipocytes tend to proliferate and migrate, preventing the formation of lipid droplets that are essential for adipose tissue functions. The hybrid bioink developed in this study maintains the physiological properties of the adipose tissue,” said Assistant Professor Byoung Soo Kim.

 “The 3D bioprinted endocrine tissues enhanced skin regeneration, indicating their potential applications in regenerative medicine. While current fat grafting procedures suffer from low survival rates and gradual resorption, our hybrid bioinks enhance endocrine function and cell viability, potentially overcoming these limitations. This approach could be particularly valuable for treating chronic wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers, pressure sores, and burns,” noted researcher Jae-Seong Lee.

The researchers stated that the “optimized 3D bioprinted adipose tissues rapidly promoted the migration of skin cells in vitro by modulating the expression levels of cell migration-related proteins” and that their “findings revealed that the tissue assembly promoted wound healing in mice by inducing re-epithelialization, tissue remodeling, and blood vessel formation and regulated the expression of skin cell differentiation-related proteins.”

This appears to be a promising step forward in bioprinting skin and beyond. Currently, there are no truly effective skin plasters or wound dressings. For individuals with severe burns, recovery is slow, and the process of changing dressings and cleaning wounds is extremely painful. Improved wound dressings that last longer or require fewer changes would be a significant advancement. A plaster incorporating bioprinted adipose tissue could serve as a valuable intermediate product. Skin is one area where even partial progress could lead to highly viable solutions—unlike an incomplete eye, which has limited function, partial skin regeneration could significantly aid burn recovery. Any product that brings us closer to fully 3D-printed skin would still hold immense value.

Advancing toward the full recreation of skin could significantly improve the lives of many patients. According to the NIH, “Every 5 seconds someone is severely burned, involving nearly 11 million people annually. A majority (95 percent) of burn cases occur in developing countries. Worldwide, an estimated 6 million patients seek medical help for burns annually, resulting in more than 300,000 deaths from fire-related burn injuries.”

While burns may seem like a relatively straightforward medical issue compared to, for example, engineering a functional heart, skin itself is an incredibly complex, high-performance material in a constant state of repair and regeneration. Injuries that damage some or all of its intricate layers can be locally devastating and even fatal. The work of the Pusan team represents a much-needed development in this space. Beyond the medical necessity, the potential global market for such a technology could be substantial, but more importantly, it could offer better treatment options for severe burn injuries, reducing suffering and improving recovery outcomes.