Production of photo-engineered cell-rich materials exhibiting living features

So far, the fabrication of man-made living human tissues using bioengineering techniques has remained elusive. Current efforts in the tissue engineering field have been moving towards the fabrication and exploitation of living materials – i.e., cell-rich platforms in which cell-cell interactions govern the material behavior and evolvability. These man-made living architectures aim to present tissue-relevant biofunctionalities and improved bioactivity, revealing tremendous potential for revolutionizing the fields of tissue engineering and disease modeling. To fulfill the pursuit of generating increasingly complex living materials that better mimic native tissues, bioengineering approaches have been focused on exploring the modification of mammalian cell surfaces to attain control over cellular interactions and to promote the assembly of living materials in a unit-programmable manner. Such increment in cellular elements' processability may open new possibilities for promoting the rapid assembly of functionalized cells into multicellular higher-order architectures in time-frames that are compatible with cell processing technologies, such as biofabrication, allowing the generation of living structures capable of closely resembling the architectural complexity and biological performance of native tissues. To be a step closer to this goal, herein, metabolic glycoengineering coupled with photo-chemistry was used to increase the versatility and processing speed of mammalian cells into 3D living materials as this has remained unattainable so far. The developed methodology led to the manufacture of mammalian living materials with suitable stability and cell viability for 7 days in culture. In the near future, these findings open new avenues to explore the light-based manufacturing of living constructs using advanced biofabrication technologies.