A team at BITS Pilani’s K.K. Birla Goa Campus has developed a 3D printable hydrogel from pharmaceutical-grade polymers and used it to print both skin tissue scaffolds and customized chewable drug tablets.
Published in the Journal of Biological Engineering, the hydrogel combines three ingredients already used in drug manufacturing. Starch 1500 (a modified maize starch from Colorcon) controls viscosity, maltodextrin from Roquette aids flow during 3D printing, and sodium alginate from DuPont Nutrition acts as the gelling agent, hardened through a reaction with calcium chloride.
All three are animal-free with established use in regulated pharmaceutical and food applications, which matters because most bioinks depend on specialized or animal-derived materials that tend to vary between batches, cost more, and face longer regulatory timelines.
Assessing the Hydrogel for Tissue Scaffolds
Whether these ingredients perform well during printing depends on how the hydrogel behaves under pressure. The material recorded a viscosity of 1.56 × 10⁶ mPa·s, within the printable range for extrusion based 3D bioprinting. It thins under extrusion force, flows through the nozzle, then recovers 87% of its original viscosity once deposited. Yield stress measured 20 Pa and flow point 108 Pa.
Those properties translated into consistent results on the print bed. Using a Trivima Basic bioprinter at room temperature, the team produced single-layer and five-layer grid structures as well as spiral shapes. Filament width averaged 0.90 ± 0.06 mm with near-perfect square pores at 1.04 ± 0.07.
Freeze-dried scaffolds showed an average pore size of 39.2 ± 13.8 μm and porosity of 62.7 ± 0.1%, within the 60-90% range considered favorable for wound healing. The scaffolds swelled to 72% of their weight within 24 hours, began degrading after two weeks, and lost roughly 82% of their mass by day 35, a timeline relevant for skin repair where the scaffold needs to hold together during early healing before gradually breaking down.
The material also needs to be strong enough to support tissue growth. Films cast from the hydrogel showed tensile strength of 33.9 ± 3.4 MPa, within the broad range reported for human skin, but extension at break was just 4.5 ± 0.6%, well below the 35-120% elongation typically wanted for skin scaffolds.
The researchers acknowledged this, suggesting the material may suit body areas that do not move much. Testing was also done on flat films rather than printed scaffolds, so the numbers describe the raw material rather than the final printed structure.
Beyond mechanical properties, a skin tissue scaffold also has to be safe for living cells. L929 mouse fibroblast viability ranged from 75% to 90%, while HaCaT human keratinocytes fared worse at 24 hours (55-66%) but climbed above 80% by 48 hours.
Blood compatibility testing showed 5.0 ± 0.0% hemolysis, placing the material in the hemocompatible category. Microscopy confirmed cells growing on the hydrogel surface, with L929 fibroblasts developing well-organized internal structures at 48 hours while HaCaT cells grew more slowly.
The second half of the study used the same hydrogel base for drug delivery. The researchers mixed 2 mg of glimepiride, an oral diabetes medication, into the formulation along with a sweetener and a colorant, then printed chewable tablets at room temperature. Each tablet started at 1,000 mg and was freeze-dried to approximately 150 mg.
Drug content across five tablets averaged 100.4% with a standard deviation of 2.8%, and the tablets released the drug gradually over four hours. The room-temperature printing is notable because it makes the process compatible with heat-sensitive drugs, though the study did not compare the release profile against an existing commercial product or pharmacopeial standard.
Building bioinks from polymers with established pharmaceutical use could shorten the path from lab to clinical or commercial use, though that potential has not been tested against actual regulatory processes here. Questions remain around the hydrogel’s limited stretchability, lower early HaCaT viability, and the absence of a drug delivery benchmark. Still, a single platform serving two distinct biomedical applications from the same commodity ingredients is what gives the work its wider relevance.
Improving Formulation and Printing Control
The BITS Pilani team is not the only group trying to close the gap between bioink formulation and regulatory ready materials. For instance, CollPlant launched BioFlex, a ready to print bioprinting kit built on recombinant human collagen for DLP bioprinting, specifically to reduce the component screening that routinely slows tissue engineering research. That approach solves reproducibility by packaging bioinks into a standardized format.
The BITS Pilani study takes a different route, starting with commodity pharma polymers that already come with batch to batch consistency instead of developing a proprietary kit. Whether that proves more practical remains to be seen, but the fact that both groups are treating formulation standardization as a priority suggests the bottleneck is widely felt.
On the drug delivery side, other research shows how formulation and printing parameters can affect the performance of 3D printed medicines. Researchers at Charles University and other Czech and Slovak institutions developed intestine targeted tablets using SLS 3D printed cores and FDM coatings. Having adjusted the formulation and printing conditions, they prevented drug release in simulated stomach conditions before achieving controlled release in the intestine.
The BITS Pilani study is at an earlier stage, demonstrating consistent drug content and gradual release over four hours without testing the tablets against an existing product or targeting a specific release site. The comparison shows that producing a printable drug formulation is an early step toward controlling pharmaceutical performance.
Titled, “Pharmaceutical polymer-based hydrogels for 3D bioprinted drug delivery and tissue engineering applications,” the study was conducted by Hemant Kumar Bankhede, Maheswari Sivaravi, Antara Poi Raiturker, Prajakta Praveen Bhende, Sagar B. Kale, Mamta Keshav Tari, Asima Shaukat, and Anasuya Ganguly.
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Featured image shows Lyophilized scaffolds image under FESEM: (A) at 1000x magnification, (B) at 2500x magnification. Image via Bankhede et. al, Journal of Biological Engineering.
