Designing Tissue Function Through Embedded Bioprinting Architectures

Embedded Bioprinting (EB) enables the fabrication of soft, cell-dense tissues within mechanically supportive environments, substantially expanding the design space of biofabrication. While EB has rapidly emerged as a powerful strategy for printing structures that are otherwise unattainable by freeform approaches, current progress is often evaluated in terms of geometric complexity rather than functional relevance. As the field evolves, a central challenge is not simply whether complex architectures can be printed, but how printing-defined structures can be intentionally designed to support tissue-specific functions. In contrast to previous reviews that primarily organize EB by supporting bath formulations, material systems, or printing modalities, this review adopts a function-guided design framework that organizes EB according to the architectural features required to support tissue-specific function. Within this framework, target tissue functions are first decomposed into structural and microarchitectural requirements, which then define fabrication objectives and guide the selection of supporting bath mechanics, material formulations, crosslinking strategies, and process parameters. Across diverse tissue systems, this framework reveals emerging structure-process-function relationships and key limitations in predictability and standardization, providing a conceptual basis for reproducible, human-relevant disease models and drug evaluation platforms while informing longer-term regenerative and implantable applications.