Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “The Ultimate Guide to 3d Printing 2015: Printing Organs”.
My name is anderson, i’m out of houston texas. I work at miller lab, which is part of rice university, so i’m working on 3d printing applications for tissue engineering, so we’re trying to see if we can adapt the 3d printing technology that’s available to biocompatible materials so that we can create organs like the liver and Tissue samples, like cardiac and all sorts of different parts, um the reprap technology and the guys typical filament-based printers – does have some concepts that are applicable like, for instance, the miller lab the professor. I work for jordan miller. He started using wrap wraps to print with sugar and essentially he’s using sugar melting it down and pulling fine fibers of sugar so that he can create a bathroom chair which is essentially one of the biggest problems in tissue engineering. We can grow cells in a petri dish, but one of the issues is that cells on the interior usually die because they can’t get the blood and only the ones on the outside survive. So we can use 3d printing and create this network tree branch like webbing structure, which we can find in our body. We can then have cell survival inside and outside sla has been the original form of 3d printing and it’s very interesting to see it become available from low end now. But typically, these machines vary in the hundreds of thousands. Material costs are also very high. Now we’re starting to see very portable compact desktop uh formats. You know with form one which is a huge hit last year and drastic improvements this year as well, and we have some new players coming in with you know three system, and you can also see in kickstarter that there’s a lot coming. I mean they weren’t available at this time, but i think next year we’ll have at least four more machines. The sla machines aren’t a very good first three bird, because it’s very involved process. The chemicals are very non-hospitable for the home environment requires multiple table spaces for cleaning and post-processing and in general, it’s not for general use parts like you’re, not going to take something off and do something stressful with it like as a tool. It’S more for aesthetics purposes. Like the target audience is more of jewelers sla allows you to have very, very high fidelity parts and that’s what it’s very good at yeah this year.
I think a lot of companies are starting to focus on form instead of purely just function. You know we made comments that there’s one printer, that laser cut wood companies are stepping up how they’re manufacturing 3d printers. It definitely shows they’re trying to target it as appliance one in your home and throughout all the printers we’re reviewing.
You definitely see that there’s an overarching theme. Yes, this thing works, but it also needs to look like it belongs in your home and i think that’s what everyone’s trying to push for this year around. What would you like to have on your desk in your office? In your home kitchen, you .
