Advanced Tissue Scaffold Fabrication Techniques

Abstract

Tissue engineering has always been bottlenecked by the scaffold. You can have the most elegant cell source and the cleverest growth factor cocktail, but if the scaffold cannot guide cells into the right three-dimensional architecture, the construct will not function as intended. Over the past decade the fabrication toolkit has expanded dramatically -- from conventional electrospinning and solvent casting to extrusion-based 3D bioprinting, melt electrowriting, two-photon polymerisation, and decellularised extracellular matrix platforms -- yet systematic comparisons across techniques remain rare. Most published studies champion a single fabrication method for a single tissue type, making it difficult to judge which approach offers the best all-round performance. We evaluated 210 tissue scaffold fabrication programmes spanning five technique families, collected from partner laboratories in France and Sweden between 2019 and 2023. A Scaffold Fabrication Quality Index (SFQI) was constructed from five weighted sub-scores: architectural fidelity, mechanical match, cell viability post-fabrication, degradation tunability, and manufacturing scalability. Weights came from regression against translational outcomes. SFQI predicted successful translation with r = +0.84 and AUC = 0.883. Extrusion bioprinting programmes scored highest (mean SFQI 0.819), while conventional solvent-casting programmes trailed at 0.591. Only 35.7 percent of programmes exceeded SFQI of 0.75, pointing to broad room for fabrication process optimisation.