Skip to main content

REVIEW article

Front. Bioeng. Biotechnol.
Sec. Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fbioe.2025.1457872
This article is part of the Research Topic Biofabricated Tissues and Organs for Clinical Impact View all 5 articles

3D BIOPRINTING FOR THE CONSTRUCTION OF DRUG TESTING MODELS -DEVELOPMENT STRATEGIES AND REGULATORY CONCERNS

Provisionally accepted
Divya Mallya Divya Mallya 1Mrunmayi Ashish Gadre Mrunmayi Ashish Gadre 1S Varadharajan S Varadharajan 2Kirthanashri S Vasanthan Kirthanashri S Vasanthan 1*
  • 1 Manipal Center for Biotherapeutics Research, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India
  • 2 Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, Karnataka, India

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    A drug to be successfully launched in the market requires a significant amount of capital, resources and time, where the unsuccessful results in the last stages lead to catastrophic failure for discovering drugs. This is the very reason which calls for the invention of innovative models that can closely mimic the human in vivo model for producing reliable results. Throughout the innovation line, there has been improvement in the rationale in silico designing but yet there is requirement for in vitro-in vivo correlations. During the evolving of the drug testing models, the 3D models produced by different methods have been proven to produce better results than the traditional 2D models. However, the in vitro fabrications of live tissues are still bottleneck in realizing their complete potential. There is an urgent need for the development of single, standard and simplified in vitro 3D tissue models that can be reliable for investigating the biological and pathological aspects of drug discovery, which is yet to be achieved. The existing pre-clinical models have considerable drawbacks despite being the gold standard in pre-clinical research. The major drawback being the interspecies differences and low reliability on the generated results. This gap could be overcome by the fabrication of bioengineered human disease models for drug screening. The advancement in the fabrication of 3D models will provide a valuable tool in screening drugs at different stages as they are one step closer to biomimic human tissues. In this review, we have discussed on the evolution of preclinical studies, and different models, including mini tissues, spheroids, organoids, bioengineered three dimensional models and organs on chips. Furthermore, we provide details of different disease models fabricated across various organs and their applications. In addition to this, the review also focuses on the limitations and the current prospects of the role of three dimensionally bioprinted models in drug screening and development.

    Keywords: Additive manufacturing, Bioengineering, 3D bioprinting, drug testing 3D models, Drug Screening and Discovery

    Received: 01 Jul 2024; Accepted: 14 Jan 2025.

    Copyright: © 2025 Mallya, Gadre, Varadharajan and S Vasanthan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Kirthanashri S Vasanthan, Manipal Center for Biotherapeutics Research, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, India

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.