Michael Gelinsky
Extrusion Bioprinting in Space
Online Space Week – Tissue Engineering & Space Medicine
25 August 2026 13:00–14:00 CEST
About the speaker
Michael Gelinsky received his PhD in Chemistry from Freiburg University (Germany). In 2010 he was appointed Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of Dresden University of Technology and head of the Centre for Translational Bone, Joint and Soft Tissue Research.
His work is focused on biomaterials and scaffold development, tissue engineering and regenerative therapies, mostly for musculoskeletal tissues. His group is also very active in the field of additive manufacturing of implants and biofabrication technologies and is investigating opportunities of bioprinting in space.
Q&A
Could microalgae for oxygen regeneration and food production eventually become part of a closed-loop system that self-functions with minimal interventions from the space mission personnel?
That would be very nice and helpful but I am not aware of systems that have achieved that yet. There is a big European consortium called MELiSSA working on such systems (more on oxygen and water than food for my knowledge) but still a number of technical problems seem to be unsolved.
What are the main precautions or lab tests for ensuring that constructs will hold their shape if you are using less viscous materials?
Thank you! Good question about which we haven’t thought in detail yet. Prediction of behaviour of materials in µg are difficult and no good µg simulation opportunities (beside clinostat and RPM – but here the volumes are too limited for printing experiments) do exist.
What we did at the very beginning was to print upside down. We were astonished that (with our quite viscous inks) we still could deposit multiple layers on top of each other with good adhesion. However, here we are printing against Earth gravity and not in µg. Up to know, we haven’t explored this method further and in a more systematic manner.
Have you tried using magnets to reduce the distance between the layers of the bioprinting to make more compacted structures?
No, we haven’t done that but it could be an interesting opportunity for stabilisation of special geometries. We did bioprinting with magnetic inks couple of years ago but aiming in deforming the constructs afterwards with external magnetic fields (for mechanical stimulation of the cells)