Step by step, Pankaj Karande has made steady progress in creating skin grafts that are much closer to what the human body itself produces and more likely to be integrated and accepted by a patient's body. In the most recent development discussed in an article in Tissue Engineering, Karande, an associate professor of chemical and biological engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the team in his lab at Rensselaer, collaborating with Yale School of Medicine, have developed a way to use 3D printing to incorporate blood vessels into the living skin they produce. "That was a big breakthrough," Karande said. Skin Bioprinting Within the past decade, 3D bioprinting has actually played a starring role in advancing the field of skin engineering.