RICCARDO LEVATO
BIOGRAPHY
Riccardo Levato is Associate Professor of Translational Bioengineering and Biomaterials at Utrecht University and at the University Medical Center Utrecht, and Principal Investigator at the Regenerative Medicine Center Utrecht. He holds a cum laude PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (Barcelona, Spain).
In 2020 he was awarded a Starting grant from the European Research Council to develop a novel volumetric bioprinting technology for organoid research and to engineer functional bone marrow analogues.
Since 2021, he is coordinator of a European consortium (ENLIGHT), developing biofabricated pancreas models to study treatments for diabetes. He has published >55 peer-reviewed articles and has received several awards for his research. Riccardo is also serving on the Board of Directors of the International Society for Biofabrication.
TOPIC: ’BIOFABRICATION STRATEGIES FOR ENGINEERING FUNCTIONAL TISSUES AND ORGANOID ASSEMBLIES’
The function of living tissues is intimately linked to their complex architectures. Advances in biofabrication technologies offer unprecedented opportunities to capture salient features of tissue composition and thus guide the maturation of engineered constructs into mimicking functionalities of native organs. In this lecture, the design of novel biofabrication strategies and printable biomaterials to enable the reconstitution of complex 3D structures with precise heterocellular, multi-material and hierarchical composition is discussed.
Architectures designed to stimulate the native interaction between multiple (stem) cell types and self-assembled organoids are introduced, with a particular focus on applications in musculoskeletal regeneration and liver tissue engineering. Layerwise hydrogel extrusion and bioprinting and light-based digital light projection printing can be leveraged to introduce vascular templates in engineered constructs. Albeit powerful and versatile, this approach poses relevant limitations on the scalability and production of constructs having clinically relevant size, as well as on the generation of free-form and support free overhanging, porous structures, typically of native anatomy.
To overcome these challenges, custom-designed light responsive hydrogels can be sculpted into cell-laden convoluted 3D structures within tens of second, via the development of layerless, volumetric bioprinting approaches inspired by visible light computed tomography. With such nozzle and shear stress-free, highly rapid cell processing approach a variety of hydrogel-based constructs can be assembled into hydrogel-based actuators for potential applications in soft robotics, or as platforms to enhance cell viability and maturation post-printing, including the shaping of large networks of hepatic epithelial organoids into defined 3D perfusable structures which exhibit biosynthetic and metabolic functions.
Altogether, the combination of the different strengths of advanced bioprinting technologies offers new opportunities for the biofabrication of large, clinically-relevant multi-tissue constructs for regenerative medicine and tissue engineering.