Exploring the Evolution of Bioprinting: Evidence from Clinical and Patent Data


Presenter: Ian Charles Miller

Faculty Sponsor: Lucy Xiaolu Wang

School: UMass Amherst

Research Area: Medical Sciences

Session: Poster Session 5, 3:15 PM - 4:00 PM, 163, C21

ABSTRACT

Bioprinting is an emerging technology poised to transform personalized healthcare and pharmaceuticals. By combining 3D printing technologies—refined by large corporations over the past decade—with cell-laden “bioinks,” bioprinting aims to enhance disease modeling for clinical trials, enable the production of implantable devices, and potentially generate fully functional organs. While proponents of these technologies hope to address the global organ shortage and reduce pharmaceutical R&D costs, significant challenges remain.

This paper identifies key factors influencing the future growth of the bioprinting industry through an analysis of bioprinting-related regulatory practices, clinical trial data, and patent filings from 2010 to 2024. Through a qualitative analysis of clinical trial content, we develop initial insights into key focus areas in bioprinting-related clinical trial design, which guide further quantitative analyses in variable construction. These refined topic areas and descriptions are then used to categorize patent data using natural language processing tools based on patent titles and abstracts. We conduct exploratory analyses to visualize how interest, investment, and focus areas in bioprinting have evolved over time and across geographic regions. Finally, we plan to perform regression analyses to examine factors associated with bioprinting growth across countries and sectors and to identify potential policy levers or firm strategies shaping these developments.


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