AccScience Publishing / MSAM / Online First / DOI: 10.36922/MSAM026270061
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ORIGINAL RESEARCH ARTICLE

The future of three-dimensional printing in healthcare: A competitive technology intelligence-based scientometric and patent landscape of three-dimensional bioprinting

Marisela Rodriguez-Salvador1†* ,  Amin Orash Mahmoudsalehi1† ,  Antonio Giovanni Carrillo- Lopez1
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1 Tecnologico de Monterrey, School of Engineering and Sciences, Monterrey, Nuevo León , Mexico
†These authors contributed equally to this work.
Received: 29 June 2026 | Revised: 22 September 2026 | Accepted: 22 September 2026 | Published online: 21 October 2026
© 2026 by the Author(. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License ( https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )
Abstract

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is increasingly transforming healthcare through advances in materials and manufacturing processes, along with the growing demand for personalized therapeutic solutions. Although substantial research has focused on materials, fabrication processes, and specific biomedical applications, comparatively less attention has been devoted to systematically integrating scientific and patent evidence to identify technological trends, innovation trajectories, and emerging opportunities. In this context, competitive technology intelligence (CTI) provides a systematic framework for integrating scientific and patent information to examine technological evolution and support the identification of emerging trajectories and opportunities. This study applied the CTI methodology to quantitatively characterize the scientific and technological landscape of 3D bioprinting and tissue engineering, while fiber-based fabrication and 3D-printed oral drug delivery were incorporated as contextual domains based on published evidence. Scientific publications and patent families published between 2021 and 2025 on 3D bioprinting and tissue engineering were analyzed using Web of Science and The Lens platform. The final datasets comprised 6,916 scientific publications and 732 simple patent families. Annual scientific publication output increased from 1,061 records in 2021 to 1,705 in 2025 (+60.7%), while published simple patent families increased from 98 to 193 (+96.9%), with year-to-year variation. China and the United States showed the highest scientific publication output. The leading patent-family jurisdictions and filing routes represented in the dataset were the World Intellectual Property Organization (380 families), the United States (363), China (306), and the European Patent Office (219); these counts were non-exclusive. The most frequently represented International Patent Classification classes were B33Y10/00 (235 patent families), B33Y80/00 (234), and A61L27/52 (210). The results revealed an expansion of scientific and inventive activity, while their integration with published evidence highlighted persistent challenges in reproducibility, biological validation, scale-up, regulation, and clinical translation. Overall, this CTI-based landscape contributes to the identification of the scientific and technological trajectories in 3D bioprinting and tissue engineering, while situating them within the broader healthcare 3D printing context, and provides strategic insights to support research prioritization, innovation planning, and future translational efforts.

Keywords
Three-dimensional printing
Competitive technology intelligence
Scientometrics
Patentometrics
Bioprinting
Tissue engineering
Technology landscape
Funding
This research was funded by Tecnológico de Monterrey and the Mexican Secretariat for Science, Humanities, Technology and Research (SECIHTI), which provided academic scholarships as members of the National System of Researchers (SNII) to author M.R.S. Scholarship funding was also granted by the SECIHTI to author A.O.M. (1246740).
Conflict of interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
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Materials Science in Additive Manufacturing, Electronic ISSN: 2810-9635 Published by AccScience Publishing