Bioprinting did not begin with a breakthrough. It began with someone loading cells into an office printer to see what would happen. Everything since has followed the same pattern: borrow a manufacturing technique, discover what biology will and will not tolerate, and adjust.
Origins: 1980s and 1990s
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 1984 | Charles Hull invents stereolithography and files the patent that establishes 3D printing as a field. Every bioprinting method descends from this and the additive techniques that followed. |
| 1988 | Robert Klebe demonstrates "cytoscribing" — using a modified Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer to deposit cells in defined two-dimensional patterns. Generally regarded as the first bioprinting. |
| 1990s | Tissue engineering matures as a discipline under Robert Langer and Joseph Vacanti. The scaffold-plus-cells paradigm that bioprinting later automates is established here. |
| 1999 | Anthony Atala's team at Wake Forest engineers bladders from patients' own cells on hand-made scaffolds and begins implanting them — not printed, but the first lab-grown organs successfully implanted in humans. The results are published in The Lancet in 2006. |
The field takes shape: 2000s
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2000 | Thomas Boland's laboratory at Clemson University modifies inkjet printers specifically for cells and materials, and files foundational patents. The term "bioprinting" enters use. |
| 2003 | Boland's group publishes work showing viable cells can be printed by thermal inkjet without being killed by the heat — a result that was not obvious beforehand and that opened the method up. |
| 2003–2004 | Gabor Forgacs and colleagues develop scaffold-free bioprinting based on tissue liquidity: place cell spheroids adjacent to one another and let them fuse, as tissues do in embryonic development. |
| 2007 | Organovo is founded in San Diego on Forgacs's work — the field's first significant commercial venture. |
| 2009 | Organovo and Invetech unveil the NovoGen MMX, one of the first bioprinters built for production rather than as a laboratory modification. |
Commercialisation and complexity: 2010s
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2010 | Organovo reports printing blood-vessel structures without a scaffold, using fused cell spheroids. |
| 2012 | Surgeons at the University of Michigan implant a 3D-printed resorbable tracheal splint in an infant with tracheobronchomalacia under compassionate use. The device holds the airway open, then dissolves as the child grows — among the clearest early cases of printing saving a life. |
| 2014 | Organovo launches exVive3D human liver tissue, the first commercially available bioprinted human tissue, sold to pharmaceutical companies for toxicity testing. |
| 2016 | Anthony Atala's group publishes the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing (ITOP) system in Nature Biotechnology, printing human-scale ear, bone and muscle constructs with built-in microchannels and implanting them successfully in animals. |
| 2016 | CELLINK launches what it markets as the first universal bioink, making reproducible, off-the-shelf material available to laboratories and allowing results to be compared between groups. |
| 2017 | A Northwestern University team led by Teresa Woodruff and Ramille Shah implants 3D-printed ovarian scaffolds seeded with follicles into mice; the mice restore hormone cycles and give birth to healthy pups. |
| 2018 | Che Connon's group at Newcastle University prints a human corneal stroma in under ten minutes using stem cells in a collagen–alginate bioink. |
| 2019 | Tal Dvir's team at Tel Aviv University prints a small vascularised heart from a patient's own cells and a personalised extracellular-matrix bioink. Roughly cherry-sized; the cells contract but do not pump in concert. |
| 2019 | Grigoryan, Miller, Stevens and colleagues publish entangled vascular networks in Science, including a printed air sac that oxygenates flowing red blood cells — a demonstration that printed architecture can perform real physiological work. |
| 2019 | Adam Feinberg's laboratory publishes FRESH v2.0 in Science, printing collagen at high resolution inside a support bath and producing a full-size human heart scaffold along with functioning valves and contracting ventricles. |
| 2019 | 3D Bioprinting Solutions operates the Organ.Aut magnetic bioprinter aboard the International Space Station, assembling constructs in microgravity without a scaffold. |
Into the clinic: 2020s
| Year | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2019–2021 | Volumetric bioprinting is demonstrated by groups at EPFL and in Utrecht: light projected into a rotating vial from many angles forms an entire centimetre-scale construct in tens of seconds rather than hours. |
| 2021 | Melissa Little's group in Melbourne reports extrusion bioprinting of kidney organoids at scale, with far greater consistency than manual methods and evidence that printed geometry influences how organoids develop. |
| 2021 | Consolidation reshapes the industry: 3D Systems acquires Allevi and Desktop Metal acquires EnvisionTEC. |
| 2022 | 3DBio Therapeutics announces AuriNovo — an ear implant 3D-printed from a patient's own cartilage cells, implanted in a woman with microtia as part of a clinical trial. The clearest case yet of a printed, cell-based implant in a human. |
| 2022 | The FDA Modernization Act 2.0 is signed in the United States, removing the blanket statutory requirement for animal testing before human trials and explicitly recognising cell-based and organ-chip alternatives. |
| 2023 onwards | Attention shifts towards manufacturing and regulation rather than new firsts: scaling production, standardising bioinks, automating cell expansion, and negotiating approval pathways for tissue products. Gene-edited pig organ transplants advance rapidly in parallel, reframing what bioprinting is competing against. |
What the timeline shows
Read end to end, three things stand out.
The pace of firsts has slowed, and that is not a bad sign. The dense run of headline results in 2016–2019 reflected a field discovering what its tools could do. The quieter period since reflects the much harder work of making those results reproducible, manufacturable and approvable.
Everything that reached a patient was thin or avascular. Bladder, trachea, bone, cartilage, ear, skin, cornea. Not one exception in nearly forty years.
The commercial and clinical timelines diverged early. Bioprinting became a business in 2014 by selling tissue for drug testing, and it has been funded that way ever since. The transplant application remains the motivation, not the revenue.
Related
- Printed organsWhere each result stands today
- CompaniesThe organisations behind these milestones
- Printing methodsFRESH, volumetric, laser-assisted
- GlossaryTerms used on this page
Last reviewed . Educational information only — not medical advice.