Tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and biofabrication pursue the long-held dream of reconstructing or recreating damaged or lost tissues by providing cells with the adequate synthetic biomimetic nano-, micro- and macro-environments to let them deploy their healing potential. To this end, an increased number of combinations of bioinspired geometries, biomaterials, and manufacturing technologies, in many cases assisted by biomolecules, growth factors and drugs, have been researched and developed during the last decades. These efforts have led to literally thousands of artificial cell niches, extracellular matrices and scaffolds for tissue engineering, which act as enhanced implants or as advanced therapy medicinal products that support cells during healing and regeneration [1-2].

In fact, since the dawn of tissue engineering, scaffolds have played a fundamental role as structural units that support cell attachment, proliferation, and differentiation into relevant tissues [3]. Nowadays scaffold-based and scaffold-free strategies coexist and synergies among them have very recently emerged [4]. However, tissue engineering is not yet straightforwardly reaching end users, and scaffolds are seldom developed considering diversity, equity and inclusion principles, which puts forward the need for further research linked to their engineering design and sustainable production. Some hurdles in these fields have been previously described [5], as well as the related ethical concerns [6].

Considering that scaffolds play a fundamental role in most tissue engineering procedures, it would be interesting to count with an internationally accepted set of geometries, acting as a library of lattices, porous materials and scaffolding structures, which could be employed for comparative purposes among materials and technologies under development. To this end, within INKplant’s EU project, an open-source library of tissue engineering scaffolds has been implemented. This library stands out for providing a comprehensive collection of scaffolds’ designs, implemented considering the specific features of most additive manufacturing technologies applicable to tissue engineering, regenerative medicine and biofabrication. Besides, the library has been developed focusing on FAIR data principles, whose relevance has been previously highlighted. The scaffolds are shared as open-source solutions with the necessary documentation for facilitating their application to research studies and, in the authors’ opinion, this and similar initiatives may be synergically integrated towards an ISO standard on tissue engineering scaffolds.

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3. Hutmacher, D. W. Scaffolds in tissue engineering bone and cartilage. Biomaterials 21, 2529–2543 (2000).
4. Ovsianikov, A., Khademhosseini, A. & Mironov, V. The Synergy of Scaffold-Based and Scaffold-Free Tissue Engineering Strategies. Trends in Biotechnology 36, 348–357 (2018).
5. Leask, F. & Terzic, A. Regenerative outlook: offering global solutions for equitable care. Regenerative Medicine 15, 2249–2252 (2020).
6. Otto, I. A., Breugem, C. C., Malda, J. & Bredenoord, A. L. Ethical considerations in the translation of regenerative biofabrication technologies into clinic and society. Biofabrication 8, 042001 (2016).