News and Insights of 3D Printing and Manufacturing
In Tennessee, oral and maxillofacial surgeon Dr. Jeffrey Brooks, and his team of residents are using EnvisionTEC’s 3D printing solutions to create better treatment plans, implants and other life-changing devices for patients with birth defects, or recovering from disease or trauma.
Though spinal cord injuries can be a life changing issue—resulting discomfort, extreme pain and even paralysis—new 3D printing research coming from the University of Minnesota could take us one step closer to treating and helping people with long-term spinal cord injuries.
“Imagine a completely robotic being consciously controlled by a biological brain,” YouBionic’s Federico Ciccarese tells us. And though my mind goes almost directly to the massive Jaegers from Pacific Rim, there is a real world example of Ciccarese’s idea that could soon become a reality.
As additive manufacturing gradually improves its viability as a manufacturing process, its role as a prototyping technology can sometimes be overlooked or underemphasized. Rather than seeing its prototyping potential as a limitation, however, there are some who are looking to shine a spotlight onto this particular application of 3D printing.
Stryker’s Spine division today announced the publication of a pre-clinical animal study comparing the performance of spinal implants made from a variety of materials, which illustrated the bone ingrowth and biological fixation capabilities of its 3D-printed Tritanium cages. The study, titled “Bony Ingrowth Potential of 3D Printed Porous Titanium Alloy: A Direct Comparison of Interbody Cage Materials in an In Vivo Ovine Lumbar Fusion Model,” was published in the July issue of The Spine Journal.
CELLINK, the Swedish startup that created one of the first universal bioinks and manufacturers cost effective bioprinters, is working on a EU co-funded project called TumorPrint. The project aims to develop and commercialize a Specific Bioprinting platform, including bioinks, software and hardware, specialized for printing of human cancer tumors.
Besides colliding hadrons to unravel the misteries of the Universe, CERN technology is at the heart of many things that have become widespread today, from CD’s to the Internet to the Cloud. They of course use 3D printers at CERN (although not subatomic ones) ad this time New Zealand based MARS Bioimaging used a CERN technology to produce a machine capable of creating the first color X-ray 3D scan of a human.
Chicago-based biotech company BIOLIFE4D announced this week that it has successfully 3D bioprinted a human cardiac tissue patch, bringing the company a small step closer to its ultimate goal of 3D bioprinting a viable and transplantable human heart.
As per a new partnership agreement, Shanghai-based 3D printing company INTAMSYS will be collaborating with the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) to further advance additive manufacturing applications for orthopaedic surgery and, specifically, applications for PEEK and other high-performance materials.
Antibacterial materials and filaments for 3D printing, something that many consider being a key development for biomedical 3D printing applications – are now widely available through a series of new materials introduced by Santhiago, Chile-based startup Copper3D.