3D Printing of Shear-Thinning Hyaluronic Acid Hydrogels with Secondary Cross-Linking

The development of printable biomaterial inks is critical to the application of 3D printing in biomedicine. To print high-resolution structures with fidelity to a computer-aided design, materials used in 3D printing must be capable of being deposited on a surface and maintaining a printed structure. A dual-cross-linking hyaluronic acid system was studied here as a printable hydrogel ink, which encompassed both shear-thinning and self-healing behaviors via guest-host bonding, as well as covalent cross-linking for stabilization using photopolymerization. When either guest-host assembly or covalent cross-linking was used alone, long-term stable structures were not formed, because of network relaxation after…

• NS
  National Science Foundation
• AH
  American Heart Association
• CS
  China Scholarship Council

  Award: 201506210148
• MR
  Materials Research Science and Engineering Center, Harvard University
• DO
  Division of Materials Research