Home-AMA: Healthcare 2026 Volumetric Bioprinting and the Vascularization Problem: How Utrecht Is Closing the Gap
WithAMA: Healthcareon June 4th putting3D printing for healthcareunder the spotlight, voices from across the industry are weighing in on where the technology is heading.
Tissue models have long been constrained by the same three problems: they take too long to build, they cannot scale meaningfully, and their structure falls short of biological reality. Oksana Dudaryeva, formerly a Postdoctoral Researcher at theUniversity Medical Center Utrecht, is working on all three at once.
Presenting her latest findings on volumetric generation of complex tissue-engineered liver systems, research conducted in the group of Riccardo Levato, Dudaryeva made the case that volumetric printing is not an incremental improvement on existing bioprinting methods, but a structural departure from them.
Unlike conventional bioprinting approaches that build structures layer by layer, volumetric printing works by projecting multiple light angles simultaneously onto a rotating vial filled with a photo-responsive solution. The light projections converge to form a three-dimensional hologram of the target object, which then solidifies within seconds to minutes.
“Volumetric printing is not an iteration on what came before, it collapses the time and structural limitations that have defined bioprinting from the start,” said Dudaryeva. The speed advantage over DLP or extrusion-based methods, she notes, is substantial.
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From Bone to Pancreas: What the Technology Can Already Build
The Levato lab has used volumetric printing to produce a range of tissue constructs that would be difficult or time-prohibitive to generate through other means. A trabecular bone model, one centimeter in diameter, incorporating human mesenchymal stem cells, endothelial cells, and small internal vessels, was generated in 12.5 seconds. A liver-on-a-chip organoid embedded within a perfusable hydrogel demonstrated functional ammonia elimination when tested.
More recently, the group has been developing a pancreas model using beta cell-like spheroids capable of producing insulin, with ongoing work toward Langerhans islets derived from pluripotent stem cells that express PDX1, a key marker of endocrine cells to make a bioprinted pancreas model that can be used for drug testing.
Source: 3D Printing Industry
