The growing need for tissue and organ replacements has resulted in significant increase in the gap between the organ donors and patients on the waitlist. Extrusion based 3D bioprinting technique is a promising approach to bridge the gap by designing patient-specific tissue engineered grafts. However, there is a dearth of materials that can be used for multiple applications related to extrusion-based 3D printing for tissue engineering. In this study, we introduce colloidal solution of two-dimensional (2D) nanosilicates as a platform technology to print complex structure via three different approaches. In first approach, we can design shear-thinning ink by combining nanosilicates in water. This can be extended to polymers that are soluble in water by adding nanosilicates to them. In second approach, we will employ colloidal nanosilicate gel as a support bath for 3D printing that nullifies the surface tension and gravitational forces. In the third approach, we demonstrate use of nanosilicate bioink as a sacrificial ink to design microfluidic devices for printing vascular channel or in vitro disease modelling. The results indicate that these nanosilicates can be successfully used for all the three approaches. Hence, this study establishes the use of nanosilicates as an ink additive, support bath and sacrificial ink for soft matter 3D printing applications. The versatility of nanosilicate-based biomaterials is expected to provide a wide-spread adoption of this technology in the additive manufacturing of soft materials.
