Abstract: Tissue engineering scaffold provides three dimensional space and metabolic environment for cell proliferation. It also decides the shape and size of new tissues and organs. The scaffold’s forming technology has always been a hot spot in tissue engineering research. From the perspective of technological methods, the fabrication of tissue engineering scaffold can be divided into non-rapid prototyping method and rapid prototyping (RP) method. And RP method gradually replaces the traditional non-rapid prototyping method for its higher precision and flexibility. Several updated RP technologies are described, which are used for tissue engineering scaffold，including direct and indirect RP technologies, and their materials, processes, precision, applications, advantages and disadvantages are compared and analyzed. Meanwhile, it is pointed out that the technological difficulties are to expand the range of material, improve the precision, adapt to complex scaffold structure, and the future hot spot will focus on forming and processing the biomaterials directly.

Key words: Rapid prototyping, Scaffolds, Tissue engineering