Tag Archives: medical
IBM Sees Exponential Growth of 3D Printing Industry
More than just a tool, 3D printing is an emerging ecosystem.
– Paul Brody, IBM on the exponential growth of the 3D printing industry
At the Siemens Global Innovation Summit in Phoenix, IBM’s Paul Brody gave a look at how manufacturing transformation is changing the traditional rules of product design and development.
Brody highlighted 3 technologies: 3D printing, intelligent robotics, and open-source engineering.
On 3D printing, he discussed key trends:
- 3D printing is rapidly achieving levels of performance required to be production-ready
- 3D printing is already used in production for medical devices and aerospace
- Performance is improving year on year
- At lower volumes, unit costs are competitive with machining and plastic injection molding
He also dove into trends on open-source and crowdsourcing, asserting that 80% of consumers told IBM they are willing to help enterprises develop their products. Brody claimed, “Accept their help or see them build your competition on Kickstarter.”
IBM had partnered with The Economist to analyze the growth rate of open-source design repositories, namely Thingiverse, and found that the number of 3D printable items is on an exponential upwards path while complexity as measured by number of parts is on a steady increase.
Paul Brody’s full talk is embedded below and more research from IBM is available here.
Nanoscribe: Micro 3D Printer May Enable Industrial Breakthrough
Micro 3D printer Nanoscribe is revolutionizing 3D printing on a tiny scale.
Today’s 3D printers can do amazing things, but take a long time to actually create an object – a few hours for an iPhone case and 2,500 hours for a full car. A new desktop 3D printer called Nanoscribe can create complex microstructures incredibly fast – seconds instead of minutes and minutes instead of hours.
Michael Thiel, chief scientific officer at Nanoscribe (a spin-off from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany) recently spoke with MIT Technology Review about his company’s new 3D printing technology and the potential impact on producing medical and electronic devices.
Printing microstructures with features a few hundred nanometers in size could be useful for making heart stents, microneedles for painless shots, gecko adhesives, parts for microfluidics chips, and scaffolds for growing cells and tissue. Another important application could be in the electronics industry, where patterning nanoscale features on chips currently involves slow, expensive techniques. 3D printing would quickly and cheaply yield polymer templates that could be used to make metallic structures.
So far, 3D microprinting has been used only in research laboratories because it’s pretty slow. In fact, many research labs around the world use Nanoscribe’s first-generation printer. The new, faster machine will also find commercial use. Thiel says numerous medical, life sciences, and nanotechnology companies are interested in the new machine. “I’m positive that with the faster throughput we get with this new tool, it might have an industrial breakthrough very soon,” he says.
The technology behind most 3D microprinters is called two-photon polymerization. It involves focusing tiny, ultrashort pulses from a near-infrared laser on a light-sensitive material. The material polymerizes and solidifies at the focused spots. As the laser beam moves in three dimensions, it creates a 3D object.
Today’s printers, including Nanoscribe’s present system, keep the laser beam fixed and move the light-sensitive material along three axes using mechanical stages, which slows down printing. To speed up the process, Nanoscribe’s new tool uses a tiny moving mirror to reflect the laser beam at different angles. Thiel says generating multiple light beams with a microlens array could make the process even faster.
Nanoscribe plans to start selling 3D printers later this year.
3D Printing Advances Dentistry in London at Daewood & Tanner Practice
The field of Dentistry is being redefined by 3D printing. As we reported last April, dental labs are increasingly using 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies to provide personalized care.
Daewood & Tanner is a specialist dental practice in London that is pioneering the use of this technology. Andrew Daewood was recently interviewed by the Financial Times.
“3D printing has recently captured the public imagination, but most 3D printers are churning out plastic junk,” says Andrew Dawood. “Dentists have been using 3D printing for 10 years, to make things that really can’t be made in any other way.”
Daewood’s firm creates dental implants using digital scans and 3D printing.
Although conventional manufacturing still produces most implants, an increasing number are being printed, often using a very durable plastic called Peek that can be implanted into the jaw to replace lost bone. “Our experience with the use of technology to assist ‘extreme cases’ enables us to make straightforward treatment even more straightforward, and for many patients, to make possible what was once considered to be impossible,” says Dawood.
Patients for whom implant treatment used not to be feasible, because they did not have enough bone left in their jaw, can now be treated. New technology allows dentists to identify islands of bone into which implants can be placed, using minimally invasive techniques. “People who once might have been told they were untreatable or needed 18 months of carefully staged, arduous reconstructive surgery, are now being treated in hours or even minutes, usually receiving fixed replacement teeth on the day of treatment,” says Dawood.
Read the full interview at the Financial Times.
Here’s a video interview with a Daewood & Tanner patient after an implant.
3D Printing Ideas Among 2012 “Science Fiction Become Facts” List
BuzzFeed posted an awesome list of the 27 Science Fictions that Became Science Facts in 2012. Among the list were ideas like invisibility cloaks, stem cell research, and self-driving cars. But 3 of the the 27 were stories about 3D printing innovations that we previously covered.
3D Printing Full-Size Houses
The D-Shape printer, created by Enrico Dini, is capable of printing a two-story building out of sandstone. Covered by us here.
3D Printed Jaw Implant Rescues 83-Year-Old Woman
In a groundbreaking first, a medical team created a method for using 3D printing to fabricate a functioning lower jaw implant in titanium. Covered by us here.
Cheap, Flexible 3D Printed Solar Photovoltaic Film
3D printing using silver ink could create cheap and flexible solar panels. Covered by us here.
Read the full list of science fiction “facts” at BuzzFeed.
Researchers Use Nano-Scale 3D Printing to Combat Prostate Cancer
Advanced nano-scale 3D printing techniques are being used to develop new drugs for prostate cancer and other applications. Parabon NanoLabs in Reston, Virginia is conducting this groundbreaking research with support from the National Science Foundation and other grants.
Using a simple “drag-and-drop” computer interface and DNA self-assembly techniques, researchers have developed a new approach for drug development that could drastically reduce the time required to create and test medications.
“We can now ‘print,’ molecule by molecule, exactly the compound that we want,” says Steven Armentrout, the principal investigator on the NSF grants and co-developer of Parabon’s technology. “What differentiates our nanotechnology from others is our ability to rapidly, and precisely, specify the placement of every atom in a compound that we design.”
The new technology is called the Parabon Essemblix™ Drug Development Platform, and it combines their computer-aided design (CAD) software called inSēquio™ with nanoscale fabrication technology.
Scientists work within inSēquio™ to design molecular pieces with specific, functional components. The software then optimizes the design using the Parabon Computation Grid, a cloud supercomputing platform that uses proprietary algorithms to search for sets of DNA sequences that can self-assemble those components.
Read the full brief at NSF.gov.
Medicine photo by epSos.de used under Creative Commons license.
