Every day it seems like we’re hearing about another 3D printed innovation in the world of footwear, from big name brands like Adidas and Nike to the 3D printed shoes that Feetz manufactures and the custom insoles by Wiivv, which were tested in real-world conditions by 3DPrint.com’s editor-in-chief Sarah Goehrke as she walked around the Materialise World Summit and Materialise HQ in Belgium this spring. Speaking of Materialise, the 3D printing solutions and software provider has announced a new partnership with winter sports gear and tailored footwear specialist Tailored Fits AG, which is based out of Switzerland. The footwear startup and Materialise will work together to launch the first end-to-end digital supply chain for custom-fit, 3D printed ski boots.

Reto Rindlisbacher, the CEO of Tailored Fits, said, “The way an individual’s foot sits in a ski-boot – the forces it exerts and the support it receives – makes a huge difference to comfort and performance, yet the issue is one our industry has failed to address.”

“We saw that 3D printing had massive potential in this respect, but this isn’t our area of expertise. Ski boots and sports gear, is. We know the market, we know skiers, we know the biomechanics involved in sports motion; we have access to one of the world’s best sports gear development labs in Italy. From our partnership with Materialise, we received access to the additive manufacturing expertise to develop the best 3D printed solution, and the answer to making mass customized production a reality.”

[Image: Tailored Fits]

While it won’t be the first 

, the two companies are really focused on their innovative supply chain process. Materialise and Tailored Fits, which was founded in 2016, spent a year co-creating a solution that’s already letting customers have their feet scanned by the sporting goods retailer partners of Tailored Fits in just ten minutes. Then, making good use of the newly developed process, the customers receive 3D printed insoles, made with FDM 3D printing technology, for different sports, tailored specifically for their feet, in less than ten days.

Final prototype render of ski boots

Tailored Fits offers an industrial solution for mass manufacturing customized fits for sports and protection gear and footwear, using digital 3D scanning and product design, 3D printing and sales processes. The solution culminates in anatomically accurate fits, which support the customer’s natural biomechanics and prevent pressure points and pain while playing their preferred sport – in addition to skiing, the company also offers custom 3D printed insoles for biking, running, and hiking.

While Materialise and Tailored Fits were developing the process together, they researched specific areas and parts that would benefit from 3D printing technology, as well as how to automate the design to delivery process.

“We quickly saw that customized insoles would be critical,” explained Dr. Alireza Parandian, the Corporate Innovations and Global Strategist for Wearables at Materialise. “Focusing on this area first, we began looking at materials and developing structures that would provide rigid support for key zones of the foot and flexible protection in others in order to maximize both comfort and performance.”

“But identifying the right material and the right interior structures was just part of the puzzle. The process of analysing anatomically detailed 3D scans, converting that individual body data into print-ready instruction and automating the ordering, production and delivery process – in other words creating a unique digital supply chain – meant working incredibly closely with the Tailored Fits team to develop the ‘tailored fit’ for them. Working with these guys has been a real honour and a co-creation project in the truest sense of the term.”

The pilot phase has been incredibly successful, and several pro athletes have already endorsed the startup’s new digital supply process with Materialise and the 3D printed insoles. The two are currently testing out the liner/full ski boot option with professional skiers, including members of a national team. Provided this goes as planned, skiers will soon be able to get fully customized, 3D printed ski boot liners and ski boots, made to ensure maximum performance and comfort.

Materialise will manage the automation process for the 3D printed ski boots and liners, as well as “provide 100% of the production capacity required to support the supply chain.”

“I think the reason this project has been so successful is that each company has brought out the best in the other,” said Rindlisbacher. “Working with experts who could devise the ideal 3D-printed solution, software set-up and then offer us a production line to support demand has meant we’ve been able to remain focused on what we do best – looking at what sports enthusiasts need from their gear and finding innovative ways to meet those needs.”

Get ready to hit the slopes – the 3D printed ski boots by Tailored Fits, made possible by its newly developed digital supply chain with Materialise, should be available this December from leading sporting goods retailers.

[Source/Images: Materialise]

One of the things that often surprises an organization that gets its first 3D printer is the unexpected uses that seem to pop out of the woodwork once it arrives.

Someone in one department will decide to get a 3D printer for a specific project, and once word of the new machine spreads through the organization, a line of people suddenly appears. “Do you think you might be able to help me with a project?” “What about this? Can you print that?”

I heard this story at Texas A&M University, where Veterinary Radiation Oncologist Michael Deveau originally got a Gigabot to 3D print components for a canine cancer treatment. Word of his success spread through the hospital, and he soon had colleagues from different departments knocking on his door to ask if he’d be able to help them out.

Deveau has since printed surgical models for neurologists and orthopedists, Ninjaflex models of canine inner ears to be implanted into toy stuffed animals on which students could practice ear exams, and devices to help a researcher with her studies on reducing bladder crystals in goats. He didn’t originally get the Gigabot to do any of those things — he didn’t even know about some of the projects prior to then — but once a solution presented itself, the applications came flowing.

A similar story happened at Syracuse University in New York, where an economics professor was looking for a way to make his class accessible to a blind student. Anyone who’s taken an economics course will know: the subject matter can be very visual, relying on graphs to tell the story of data and trends.

The university had recently opened the doors to a brand-new makerspace, home to a few dozen 3D printers. The economics professor approached John Mangicaro, manager of the makerspace, to see if there might be a better solution for this student than what was already in place.

Mangicaro worked with the professor to convert graphs from the coursework into 3D CAD files which were then printed on the makerspace’s large-scale Gigabot. Based on feedback from the student, they tweaked print settings like layer height until the desired outcome was reached. By the end of it, the professor had a collection of Braille-esque graphs that his student could call on for homework and exams.

Syracuse didn’t originally build a lab to 3D print teaching aids to make their classes more accessible — it was a happy byproduct of making the right tools available on campus. And this is exactly one of the things that makes 3D printers so powerful: their ability to unlock previously unconsidered or impossible solutions to problems. Give people access to a tool with nearly limitless potential, and they might just surprise you.

So if your organization is thinking about getting a 3D printer, prepare yourself. You may find yourself working on product ideas you hadn’t considered, or printing off-the-wall solutions to problems that weren’t even on your radar, or you may unintentionally make yourself the new most popular person in the office.

To repurpose a famous quote: “If you can build it, they will come.”

Morgan Hamel is the Creative Director at re:3D.

There are a lot of questions one needs to ask when considering buying a 3D printer. How fast is it? What materials can it print with? What kind of detail will the finished parts have? Those are just a few, but before you even get to questions like those, you have to ask yourself what kind of 3D printer technology you want. If you’re looking at desktop 3D printers, you’ll likely be choosing between two technologies: Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) and stereolithography (SLA). Each has its own advantages and disadvantages, but FDM is typically used for 3D printing larger, stronger parts while SLA is reserved for small, finely detailed parts such as jewelry and dental tools.

Choosing between FDM and SLA is relatively simple if you have a very specific purpose in mind; if you’re a jeweler, you’re likely going to want to go with SLA, for example. But what if you want to 3D print both finely detailed parts and large, strong prototypes? FDM is great for a lot of things, but it’s never been able to match the kind of resolution that SLA offers. Many consumers will invest in both FDM and SLA 3D printers to be used for different applications, but a young company is about to offer the option to have both in one machine.

Layer One is a Taiwan-based company that got its start through a successful crowdfunding campaign in 2013. Its Atom delta FDM 3D printers have become highly popular in Taiwan, and now Layer One is branching out into SLA – but it’s not abandoning FDM. The Atom 3, due to be shipped sometime next year, will feature both technologies.

“Even with our ultra-rigid design and a .2mm nozzle,it’s impossible to achieve super high detail with FDM, no matter how hard you try,” said Lawrence Lee, Founder and CEO of Layer One. “SLA is the only way we can offer this capability to our customers…SLA machines require a very sturdy Z (vertical) motion system, and delta’s provide that better than the conventional cantilever system. Of course, there will be challenges to designing a user-friendly module versus a standalone machine, but we accept them gladly.”

Layer One cites the falling prices of SLA technology as one reason that this machine will be possible. As Lee said, the company will stick with the delta model for the Atom 3, which will have a modular design that enables the user to switch back and forth between SLA and FDM. The reservoir attaches to the build plate, and the SLA build platform rides on the magnetic control arms.

“The Atom 3 combines FDM and SLA by way of its MagSwap module system,” Mike Galvez, Global Marketing for Layer One, told 3DPrint.com. “You would simply disconnect the FDM print module from the magnetic rods, replace it with the SLA build platform, and affix the resin tank to the FDM build plate.”

The SLA portion of the Atom 3 will feature LCD technology, and the printer will offer a build volume of 65 x 120 x 250 mm. SLA layer thickness ranges from 25 to 50 to 100 microns. Not much further detail has been released about the Atom 3 at this time, but expect more information to become available as the 3D printer gets closer to its ship date next year.

[Images: Layer One]

It’s no secret that 3D printing is changing the face of the medical field. The technology has many applications when it comes to healthcare, from custom medicines and prosthetics to tissue engineering. Two doctors from Austin Hospital in Melbourne want medical professionals to be fully aware of 3D printing potential, and recently published a paper in the Medical Journal of Australia that explains what they believe are the top five areas in which 3D printing technology has the potential to change the medical field.

Co-authors of the paper, titled ‘Three-dimensional printing in medicine,’ include Dr. Jasamine Coles-Black, Ian Chao, and Jason Chuen, the Director of Vascular Surgery at Austin Health and a Clinical Fellow with the University of Melbourne. Chuen says that 3D printing technology will transform medicine, and even has a 3D printer in his office. With help from the University of Melbourne’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, his viewpoint and do-it-yourself 3D printing approach to his work have resulted in a 3D Medical Printing Laboratory at the hospital.

[Image: Flickr]

“It is a revolutionary technology that will make medical care better and faster, and more personalised. But what we need is for more medical professionals to start exploring and experimenting with what this new technology can do, because many things that we thought of as impossible are now becoming possible,” Chuen said. “I think we are moving towards a world where if you can imagine it, you will be able to print it – so we need to start imagining.”

He doesn’t think we’ll ever get to a point where fully 3D printed human organs are a possibility, but Chuen believes that someday, doctors will be able to bypass the need for some transplants by 3D printing human tissue structures that are able to perform an organ’s basic functions; that’s why the first area of potential the paper names is 3D bioprinting and tissue engineering. We’ve already seen 3D printed organoids used for research, which mimic full organs at a small scale and are built with stem cells that are stimulated to grow into the functioning unit of an organ.

“Unless there is some breakthrough that enables us to keep the cells alive while we print them, then I think printing a full human organ will remain impossible,” said Chuen. “But where there is potential is in working out how to reliably build organoids or components that we could then bind together to make them function like an organ.”

The challenge now is to scale 3D printed organoids up into a viable structure that’s able to help a failing organ inside a human patient. The issue is that cell cultures are printed in layers that are suspended in a gel, but they can die quickly inside the gel. This isn’t a problem for organoids and other small structures, which can be quickly built and then transferred back to a nutrient solution, but it is for larger structures like organs, as the first layers of cells will die out before it’s even fully 3D printed.

3D printed “polypills” can replace multiple medications with just one pill. [Image: Pixabay]

I’ve heard it said that the older you get, the more medications you have to take each day, which is why another area Chuen believes 3D printing could have a major impact on is pharmaceuticals. Instead of taking ten separate pills each day,

could make it possible to combine all ten pills into one. Instead of embedding one drug in a pill that will dissolve and release the medicine at a specific time, multiple drugs, with multiple release times, could be put into one 3D printed polypill; this solution has actually been developed already for hypertension and diabetes patients.

A 3D printed plastic aorta. [Image: Austin Health 3D Medical Printing Laboratory]

There have been many studies about surgeons using

, which can safely speed up operations and offer considerable cost savings. Chuen, who says that surgical rehearsal is yet another area of potential for 3D printing, and Dr. Coles-Black 3D print copies of patients’ kidneys for pre-planning purposes before removing tumors from the organ. Chuen also 3Ds print plastic aorta models, so he’s able to practice procedures like inserting and expanding a stent ahead of time.

Chuen explained, “By using the model I can more easily assess that the stent is the right size and bends in exactly the right way when I deploy it.”

It costs AUD$2,000 per hour to run an operating theatre, according to Chuen – the cost of the plastic 3D printing material he uses for the aorta models is roughly AUD$15, or AUD$50 for flexible material, like thermoplastic polyurethane. The 3D segmentation software he uses is about AUD$20,000 a year, but the savings from inexpensive models to get patients out of surgery more quickly more than make up for this.

3D printed kidney with tumor in blue and blood vessels in pink and purple. [Image: Austin Health 3D Medical Printing Laboratory]

3D printed custom prosthetics is also a major area of 3D printing potential in the medical field. For example, surgeons used to cut a patient’s bone to fit the prosthetic for hip replacements, but the technology is used more and more to manufacture patient-specific prosthetics, which means that mass-supplied prosthetics could be on their way out.

Customized production of medical devices and medicine is now possible thanks to 3D printing, which opens up the potential for production to become localized. Instead of warehouses stuffed with spare prosthetics and packaged medications, distributed production – which Chuen says is the fifth area of medicine where 3D printing has the most potential – could replace the overstock with digital design files, which pharmacies and hospitals could download and print on demand.

However, he warns that distributed production comes with its own risks, including ensuring the quality of end products.

“That represents a huge shift and we have to work out how it could work,” Chuen said. “But if we get the regulation right then it will transform access to medical products.”

He believes that medical professionals need to remain “up to speed with the technology,” as their experience will be necessary in driving the successful adoption of 3D printing in the medical field.

[Source:

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If you’re familiar at all with Kapton, you may know it as its tape form. Kapton Tape is used commonly in electrical applications and is known for being able to hold up in extremely high or low temperatures – from about  -450º to 500ºF. The material itself, a foil-like polyimide, possesses excellent thermal and chemical stability and so is often used as external insulation that wraps spacecraft, satellites, and planetary rovers. It’s also used to make insulating blankets.

Kapton’s molecular structure is made up of carbons and hydrogens inside benzene rings, giving it its strong thermal and chemical properties but also making it difficult to produce except for in very thin sheets. That’s changing now, though, because a group of researchers at Virginia Tech have figured out how to 3D print Kapton.

Over the course of a year, researchers from the school’s College of Engineering and College of Science managed to synthesize the macromolecules, letting them remain stable and retain their thermal properties while being 3D printed. Chemistry Professor Timothy Long, director of the Macromolecules Innovation Institute (MII), and Maruti Hegde, then a postdoctoral researcher (now a research assistant at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), were looking into the idea of 3D printing aromatic polymers like Kapton. Assisted by a graduate student team, the researchers were able to derive the novel polymer synthesis design and allow the polyimide to be 3D printed.

Associate Mechanical Engineering Professor Christopher Williams, who is also Associate Director of MII and leader of the Design, Research and Education for Additive Manufacturing Systems (DREAMS) Laboratory, worked with his lab, led by graduate students Viswanath Meenakshisundaram and Nicholas Chartrain, to exact the process for 3D printing.

“A rewarding part of this research has been working with the terrific students that helped enable this discovery. It has been fun to watch the Chemists (Maruti Hegde) learn the vocabulary of the additive manufacturing students (Nick Chartrain and Viswanath Meenakshisundaram), and vice versa. I think these types of students are the future of additive manufacturing,” Williams told 3DPrint.com. “They have developed a skillset in both materials science / chemistry and manufacturing, which I believe represents the future of the additive manufacturing workforce; you need both skillsets to address the critical gaps present in the field today.”

Most 3D printable polymers tend to lose their mechanical strength at around 300°F, but the 3D printed Kapton can maintain its properties above 680ºF – and its heat-resistant ceiling before degradation is 1020ºF. Addtionally, the 3D printed Kapton is just as strong as its thin film counterpart, and can potentially be 3D printed into any shape or size.

“We can imagine this being used for printing a satellite structure, serving as a high-temp filter or a high-temp flow nozzle,” said Williams. “We can imagine using the wide geometric and microscale possibilities offered by 3-D printing to further improve existing designs – say, a more lightweight satellite, a filter that provides optimum/efficient flow, a nozzle with a designed flow path that allows greater exit velocity and efficiency.”

Christopher Williams and Timothy Long

Williams and Long have worked together on several projects involving 3D printing, and have made several advances including:

Their work with 3D printable Kapton was recently published in a paper entitled “3D Printing All-Aromatic Polyimides using Mask-Projection Stereolithography: Processing the Nonprocessable,” which you can access here.

“Fundamentally we want to answer the research question, ‘what makes a material printable?’; along the way, we want to continue to add to the materials portfolio of the technologies,” Williams told us. “…Our approach is very integrated and concurrent; it’s not just ‘passing material from lab to the next.’ Tim’s lab and my lab are in constant communication throughout the discovery process; we are going back and forth with our understanding of how the material should be tuned for the process, and how the process should be tuned for the material. They are extremely coupled; they cannot be separated. We have coined this concurrent design of materials and printing processes, ‘Molecules to Manufacturing.'”

The applications of 3D printed Kapton go beyond outer space and could potentially include printed electronics and other applications that require extreme temperature-resistant materials. The researchers have filed a US patent for the 3D printable Kapton and have already been receiving interest from several companies.

[Images provided by Virginia Tech]

Often described as the biggest company you’ve never heard of, Jabil is a digital solutions provider working on a global scale. The company’s Blue Sky Innovation Centers offer a hub of activity with in-house facilities to create for and connect with customers. The Blue Sky Center in San Jose, California is home to an assortment of technological solutions — and I recently had the opportunity to visit, hearing more about the offerings from company executives during an analyst and media tour in Silicon Valley. ‎Vice President, Global Automation and 3D Printing John Dulchinos and Director of Digital Manufacturing Rush LaSelle discussed Jabil’s plans to drive additive manufacturing into industry.

Dulchinos, who has shared his insights with us regarding the future of industrial 3D printing on several occasions, presented a look into Jabil’s relationship with HP and the companies’ shared vision for bringing additive manufacturing into the wider manufacturing workstream.

“We have a 20-25 year relationship with HP as a supplier; for MJF, we reached out to HP because it’s HP,” Dulchinos said of the well-known company’s strength as a partner. “We are interested in additive manufacturing because it’s manufacturing, not just prototyping. Look where 3D printing is involved now, it’s a really small part of manufacturing. We are trying to create an ecosystem with a number of partners; that’s not a trivial thing to do.”

In keeping with that theme of partners in 3D printing, present at the Blue Sky Center were a number of 3D printers from a variety of manufacturers. In addition to Jet Fusion 3D printers from HP, I saw on-site 12 Ultimaker 3 machines, an Objet 260, a Form 2, and a WASP delta; the center additionally houses metal machines from EOS and will be getting technology from Carbon in.

Today, Jabil was also announced to be the first customer to lease a commercial DragonFly 2020 3D printer from Nano Dimension. This electronics 3D printer, which has been in beta for some time as it geared up toward commercial release now kicked off with Jabil, fits well into a strategy toward looking at 3D printing electronics mentioned on-site last week in San Jose.

“We have been investing in 3D printing sister technologies, including printed electronics to create solutions that don’t require a rigid circuit board,” Dulchinos said. “Electronics is in our future, but not as a circuit board — it will be integrated.”

3D printed functional parts created via MJF are happy to showcase their properties

Jabil is no stranger to early adoption of promising technologies they believe in, as demonstrated with their experience with HP. In May 2016, Dulchinos noted, Jabil had one of the first alpha machines outside of Barcelona, directly upon the technology’s public unveiling. That particular machine is now non-operational, but has been updated with production units.

“We put enormous effort into ensuring the quality of what we’re making,” Dulchinos said in Jabil’s 3D printing room. “3D printers are an enabler; 3D printing in many cases is not a full solution. We need that full end-to-end digital solution to be truly a customer solution.”

LaSalle continued, noting that manufacturers are a traditionally risk-averse lot. The two discussed the quality assurance programs in place at Jabil to compare and qualify manufacturing processes, including CT scanning to ensure dimensional stability of 3D printed parts. They walked us through some customer use cases, showcasing the way that design for additive manufacture (DfAM) has been changing the way that products can be created in an additive, rather than subtractive, way to optimize design and capitalize on the lightweighting and other benefits that 3D printing has become famous for offering. Dulchinos showed us a fixture for use in the shoe industry, while LaSalle pointed toward lightweighting being of primary concern in the automotive industry.

“There are three people who need to be convinced for conversion” to using additive manufacturing processes, Dulchinos explained of rising adoption. “R&D, manufacturing engineers, and the supply chain. Leaders in every industry are looking at 3D printing today. In most cases, what they want to know is how can they do what they’re doing today, but better. We are also seeing smaller, newer companies using 3D printing for a new application model; these small companies are looking to disrupt something.”

Looking specifically toward their partnership with HP, Dulchinos noted that that company’s open approach to the 3D printing industry is setting it apart in a big way. With the alliance with Deloitte announced during this time, HP and its partners are moving forward in the all-important ecosystem surrounding additive manufacturing as it takes its place in the larger manufacturing industry.

“Regarding HP, the least pull of the magnet was the technology itself; what was really powerful for us is that HP is an inclusive company,” Dulchinos said. “There had been a hoarding mentality — patents, proprietary closed ecosystems — that has constrained the industry. HP has taken an open approach, and that makes possible that move into manufacturing.”

Recent announcements are big and full of promise and ambition — but of course manufacturing won’t be transformed overnight. Manufacturing itself is a highly pragmatic industry, reliant upon real, provable solutions. The more 3D printing comes to prove itself out in use case after use case, offering real-world solutions beyond (but always including the all-important) prototyping process, the more we will see it be widely adopted.

“We’re at the bottom of the first in an extra-inning game,” Dulchinos said of adoption in Industry 4.0.

As everyone in the presentations at Jabil and HP last week were deeply involved in the additive manufacturing industry, he pointed out as well that there may be an informed over-enthusiasm at play. Optimism can run high among those familiar with the capabilities of 3D printing, though it as yet retains a very small slice of the $12 trillion manufacturing pie.

“We’re all going to overestimate how quickly this will impact manufacturing,” Dulchinos cautioned. “But when we look further out, it will be monumental. We’ll all be super excited, and we have major investment around the world.”

Is 3D printing set to truly take on a multi-trillion dollar global industry today? Definitely not. But will it have an increasing impact? Thanks to the efforts of global powerhouses like Jabil, Deloitte, and HP, with true technological innovation — the outlook is strong indeed.

[All photos: Sarah Goehrke]

Medical researchers and scientists have created all kinds of medical marvels, from brain tissue and cartilage to a heart and a pancreas, by 3D printing stem cells. In Australia, Swinburne University of Technology PhD candidate Lilith Caballero Aguilar is currently collaborating on a project with surgeons and researchers at BioFab3D@ACMD, the country’s first bioengineering facility based in a hospital, about how stem cells are fed once they’re inside the body. She is working to develop methods to control the rate of release for growth factors, which stem cells need for development once they’ve been implanted, and the research could help doctors use biological 3D printing techniques to regenerate damaged or missing tissue.

Caballero Aguilar says that working alongside surgeons and other university researchers at the facility has had a major impact on her work.

“We complement each other. If I have doubt, we can discuss it and reshape the project as we go, which helps to reach a better outcome. At the end of the day, everyone is doing a bit of work in a big project. It feels very rewarding,” Caballero Aguilar said.

The facility was established through a partnership between Swinburne, St Vincent’s Hospital Melbourne, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Electromaterials Science, the University of Melbourne, RMIT University, and the University of Wollongong Australia. Biology experts, surgeons, researchers, and biomedical engineers work at the facility to “pioneer innovations,” like nerves, re-engineered limbs, and tissues.

Cellink Inkredible Bioprinters [Image: Swinburne]

BioFab3D@ACMD has specific facilities for Molecular Biology, Materials Characterisation, Cell Culture & Bioreactors, and 3D Fabrication, which boasts 3D printer offerings like the

, the

, and the

.

Caballero Aguilar’s stem cell work is part of two of the facility’s major research projects, one which focuses on repairing damaged muscle fibers and another regarding damaged cartilage regeneration; both are using advanced technologies, like bioprinting, to implant materials into the body, including the handheld 3D Biopen that allows surgeons to ‘draw’ biomaterials into a patient directly and has been successfully tested, using knee cartilage, on six sheep.

BioPen

She is working to manipulate polymer materials into release mechanisms for stem cell growth factors, which would form part of the 3D bioink drawn into the body. Controlling the delivery of growth factors is very important – stem cells take at least six weeks to grow into tissue, so the growth factors need to be slowly released over the entire time period. Caballero Aguilar shakes an oil and water solution at an intense rate, which is called the emulsion method, to create microspheres, which are crosslinked to form a substance that’s able to hold the growth factors.

Swinburne Professor of Biomedical Electromaterials Science Simon Moulton, who is Caballero Aguilar’s supervisor, said that the success of her stem cell research project was helped along by “the opportunity to collaborate directly with orthopaedic surgeons and muscle specialists at St Vincent’s Hospital.”

Swinburne PhD candidate Lilith Caballero Aguilar and Professor Simon Moulton in a lab at BioFab3D@ACMD. [Image: Swinburne]

Professor Moulton said, “Without this space, Lilith’s project would be a much smaller project without the translation benefit. It still would be great research done at a very high level, she would have publications and be able to graduate, but working in this collaborative environment, she can achieve all of that, while also having her research go into a clinical outcome that actually has benefit to patients.”

[Source:

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Countries, governments, and leaders around the world do not always see eye to eye on everything, to say the least. When it comes to cancer though, nearly all of us have been affected and are hoping for a cure–no matter where we live. While most of us are relegated to donating and helping to raise funds through many different and often publicized events, some scientists, researchers, and surgeons are literally on the cutting edge of eliminating cancer—and often with 3D printing at the forefront of their innovative procedures.

China has made enormous strides with 3D printers. They have created new metal 3D printing technology. They have stunned the world with 3D printed houses. But as with so many other countries today, their most important work has been in the medical field, from saving the lives of pediatric heart patients to helping a patient walk again, and far more. Now, a hospital in China highlights 3D printing as one of the ways they are helping to fight cancer safely.

The St. Stamford Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou in Guangzhou City, China has been using 3D printed guides, or templates, to allow for more precision in their surgeries. Dr. Haishan Bai, chief physician and a Nano-knife surgeon, credits 3D printing with allowing for extra safety measures in procedures. By employing the Nano-knife technique, surgeons can treat tumors in major organs, using an electrical current to eliminate cancerous tissue.

Not only can surgeons use models (created from CT scans and MRIs) as they are training for a surgery (which may mean weeks of preparation), they can also use them to educate the patients and their concerned families, as well as medical students who may specialize in such surgeries later. The 3D printed models can then be used as guides in the operating room. Although using 3D printed models and surgical guides may be more common today, not long ago at all these resources were not available.

St. Stamford Modern Cancer Hospital Guangzhou is also using other techniques in fighting cancer, such as:

• Transarterial Chemoembolization (TACE) – also known as arterial infusion chemotherapy, this technique uses specialized catheters to knock out cancerous cells, with 95 percent of the chemotherapy going straight into the tumors.
• Cryotherapy – uses needles to deaden malignant tumors by using freezing temperatures.
• Immunotherapy – a technique meant to boost the immune system as blood is taken and then fortified with immune cells.

Dr. Xiachi Peng, chief oncologist at St. Stamford, states that several of their patients are now cancer free and living normal lives, including a Vietnamese patient with stage 4 cancer who has now been healthy for seven years.

A patient from Lipa, Batangas who was recently treated for stage 4 cancer has also seen amazing results after a year and a half.

“My left lung is already clear of cancerous tumor but my right still has a small lesion,” she said.

Another patient from San Pablo City, Laguna who had a similar diagnosis is also responding very well to treatment.

“Eighty percent of the cancer cells are gone. But the doctors are still determining the primary source,” said her nephew, who is looking after her since her hospitalization in Guangzhou.

Dr. Haishan Bai expects that the therapies being used by St. Stamford will serve as ‘the future of cancer treatment,’ allowing for patients to get well with minimally invasive therapy and targeted surgeries.

[Source: 

/ Images: Superbalita File Photo / Roger E. Vallena]