Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Can a 3d printer Help You Heal Faster?”.
Hey everyone tyler here for make magazine this past weekend. We got to visit 3d heels here in san francisco. This is a conference dedicated to exploring the applications of 3d printing in the medical field. Now, there’s already a ton of really exciting ways. People are looking to use 3d printing in the healthcare field, everything from printing out surgical pre-visualizations to make surgeries easier to printing organic material.
One company anatomics is looking to create customized, surgical prosthetics that make a surgeon’s job easier much in the same way that a drilling jig makes a woodworker’s job easier. Anatomics was a start of the phd project in 1991 and i was one of the first people in the world to join a 3d printer and a ct scanner together and after my phd finish. The surgeons wanted to have craniofacial reconstructive implants and and bio models. And so we set up anatomics in about 1995 and anatomics is a custom manufacturer of bespoke 3d printed device manufacturer. So we create individualized implants for people and now, with the uptake of 3d printing technology and the improvement in the software and the cloud-based computing, we can create mass customization, which means that we can produce custom implants for just about everybody around the world. Potentially, with this technology and eliminate the off the shelf and the mass producing type of implants, so ikea surgery means that the surgeons plan, the operation and because we create a customized device or a patient-specific device, we can predict exactly which screws we require to get maximal. Fixation of the device in the spine, for example, and ikea, said it means that it’s planned out and we know which each component in the uh in the construct for the spinal surgery, for example, is planned. So we know exactly how long each screw will be.
We’Ve got a custom-made device that fits exactly with the patient and it eliminates all of the steps of assembly of the device in in the surgery. It makes it so that that assembly is obvious and it’s sort of like easy for the surgeon to do the operation. So traditionally, surgeons have to sort of build devices on the operating table or manufacture a solution as they proceed with the surgery, the more it can be planned out of the or means that we can manufacture the solution just in time. At the point of matter at the point of use and have that device then ready for the surgery, which means that there’s a lot more efficiency, so we use the best of all the different 3d printing technologies. We use polymer printing and we use metal printing. We use different types of devices.
We use stereo lithography, select laser sintering fdm. So what anatomics does is we select the best technologies to create the device? That’S going to be the best for the patient and we’re an open platform business? So we select the right sort of technologies to give us the best possible product and that product is customer bespoke made for an individual person. I want to apologize for the sound in these interview segments we had to film them in this sort of happy hour segment of the conference, and things were pretty loud in that room anyhow.
We also spoke with the co-founder of se3d, which is a bay area, company building bio printers for both the science and education fields. So the main difference with bio principle versus 3d printing is that instead of printing out plastic materials, we’re using a lot of biomaterials and these biomaterials are compatible with cells. So the essential component is that we want to use materials where cells can grow and they can proliferate and differentiate in some cases for various tissue engineering applications. There’S a variety of materials that you could use to support cell growth. Most of these materials, most of the biomaterials are hydrogels. They can be synthetic or they can be natural based materials. So a good example would be something like collagen, which most of us are probably familiar. So collagen can come from like a fish skin or a rat tail, and they are usually very biocompatible and they help to support cell growth as well. So collagen is a common material.
Other materials could be gelatin, alternate a lot of natural materials and provide sort of the matrix for the cells to grow in um. So we make desktop bioprinters that we’re hoping to definitely democratize this technology kind of a makerbot version of you know. Bioprinting. We want to make this technology more accessible to not only researchers but also to students, so we’re pushing really heavily on making sure that every classroom or every lab biotech lab has a bioprinter and we’re also supporting them by providing education and curriculum and training to the Teachers so that that can be implemented very easily. So actually, when we initially designed our printers, we started sort of with a rip wrap kind of a platform as well. A lot of the components are off the shelf and you can definitely you know.
There’S a couple groups who are already using riprap printers and modifying the toolkit, and our two head is also very simple: extrusion based mechanism that is powered by a stepper motor and there’s also, obviously other systems that you could use but yeah. Definitely this is something that can be done. You know you have to kind of understand the firmware and making the necessary modifications to make it a bio future versus just a regulatory manager. In the last five years, i think we have grown a lot as a overall as an industry.
A lot of the research that came from academia are now being applied in the industry, which is really great, so you will start seeing in the last five years. We start seeing a lot of biotech startups who are focused on industry applications for pharma and even for animal, for meat, printing, for example. It’S also a great example, so i think that definitely a lot of the work are now moving for industry applications that are more relevant, so i would say that it’s been really great. I think these last five years for bioprinting, it’s a growing industry and i’m really excited to see what’s to come next, that’s just a few of the stories that we picked up at 3d heels this year.
We have a few more to follow up on and you’ll be seeing that later this year. Thank you so much for watching be sure to like and subscribe for more content from mike you .