BITS Pilani prints skin scaffolds and chewable tablets in a lab study

At room temperature in Goa, a team at BITS Pilani’s K.K. Birla Goa Campus pushed one hydrogel through a 3D bioprinter and produced skin-tissue grids, five-layer structures and spirals. The same formulation also became chewable tablets containing glimepiride, an oral diabetes medication. One material, two biomedical uses: that is the practical proposition of the laboratory study published in the Journal of Biological Engineering.

The recipe relies on three pharmaceutical-grade ingredients: modified maize starch to control viscosity, maltodextrin to help the material flow, and sodium alginate to form the gel after reaction with calcium chloride. Under extrusion pressure, the hydrogel thins enough to pass through the nozzle, then recovers 87% of its original viscosity after deposition. Printed filaments averaged 0.90 ± 0.06 mm, with pores averaging 1.04 ± 0.07 mm in the printed grids.

The resulting freeze-dried scaffolds had 62.7 ± 0.1% porosity and an average pore size of 39.2 ± 13.8 μm. They absorbed water, swelling to 72% of their weight within 24 hours, began degrading after two weeks and lost roughly 82% of their mass by day 35. Those timings could suit early skin repair, when a scaffold must remain present before gradually breaking down. But the material stretched only 4.5 ± 0.6% before breaking, well below the 35-120% elongation typically wanted for skin scaffolds, so the researchers point to body areas that do not move much. The strength measurements came from flat films, not printed scaffolds.

The biological tests also leave a mixed picture. L929 mouse fibroblast viability ranged from 75% to 90%, while HaCaT human keratinocytes showed 55-66% viability at 24 hours and rose above 80% by 48 hours. Blood testing found 5.0 ± 0.0% hemolysis, placing the material in the hemocompatible category. For the tablets, the team printed 2 mg of glimepiride into units that began at 1,000 mg and weighed approximately 150 mg after freeze-drying; drug content averaged 100.4% across five tablets, with gradual release over four hours.

So what changes concretely? Researchers get a printable bioink made from animal-free ingredients with established pharmaceutical and food uses, rather than a formulation dependent on specialized or animal-derived materials that can vary between batches, cost more and face longer regulatory timelines. The room-temperature process could also accommodate heat-sensitive drugs. The possible benefit is a shorter path from formulation to biomedical use, but the study did not test that path against an actual regulatory process, compare drug release with a commercial product or pharmacopeial standard, or demonstrate a clinical scaffold. For now, the work is a lab-scale platform with a clear use case and several engineering questions still open.