Three-dimensional printing of a patient-specific engineered nasal cartilage for augmentative rhinoplasty

Autologous cartilages or synthetic nasal implants have been utilized in augmentative rhinoplasty to reconstruct the nasal shape for therapeutic and cosmetic purposes. Autologous cartilage is considered to be an ideal graft, but has drawbacks, such as limited cartilage source, requirements of additional surgery for obtaining autologous cartilage, and donor site morbidity. In contrast, synthetic nasal implants are abundantly available but have low biocompatibility than the autologous cartilages. Moreover, the currently used nasal cartilage grafts involve additional reshaping processes, by meticulous manual carving during surgery to fit the diverse nose shape of each patient. The final shapes of the manually tailored implants are highly dependent on the surgeons’ proficiency and often result in patient dissatisfaction and even undesired separation of the implant. This study describes a new process of rhinoplasty, which integrates three-dimensional printing and tissue engineering approaches. We established a serial procedure based on computer-aided design to generate a three-dimensional model of customized nasal implant, and the model was fabricated through three-dimensional printing. An engineered nasal cartilage implant was generated by injecting cartilage-derived hydrogel containing human adipose-derived stem cells into the implant containing the octahedral interior architecture. We observed remarkable expression levels of chondrogenic markers from the human adipose-derived stem cells grown in the engineered nasal cartilage with the cartilage-derived hydrogel. In addition, the engineered nasal cartilage, which was implanted into mouse subcutaneous region, exhibited maintenance of the exquisite shape and structure, and striking formation of the cartilaginous tissues for 12 weeks. We expect that the developed process, which combines computer-aided design, three-dimensional printing, and tissue-derived hydrogel, would be beneficial in generating implants of other types of tissue.