3D Printing in Medicine

 by Anjali Arackal

3D printing was one of the most prolific recent advances in technology, with obvious applications in medicine. Since its invention in 1981, how far have we come in regards to practical uses?

Perhaps one of the most obvious uses in medicine, 3D printing prosthetics have come a long way. The Ability Hand, the world’s first touch-sensing bionic hand,uses 3D printing as part of the manufacturing system to lower cost and increase speed.  More and more medical implants utilise 3D printing for its specificity, but this creates challenges as infection can be a risk with introducing foreign elements. One technology known as electron beam melting prints in a vacuum to prevent contamination, and can print in titanium (often used in implants for its strength and resistance to chemical reactions). 

3D printing has many uses in medical research. Specifically, it can recreate tumours in 3D  to test drugs on, mimicking their “microenvironment” (cells, blood vessels, molecules present etc) better than the currently used 2D cancer cell cultures. The technology is so specific that you can control exactly where blood vessels are placed! This is more similar to how tumours develop in the body compared to normal cell cultures, so drugs that are effective are more likely to carry over to human trials successfully. 

One of the most promising avenues of research is 3D printing organs; so far, an entire human liver and kidney have been printed using a patient’s own cells, by a research company called Organovo (very creative name). Currently, research is focused on how to make these printed organs functional - one possible avenue is printing on the microscopic level to mimic how organs grow cell-by-cell in the body. 

In the future, we may move away from the mass production of generic drugs. Medicines could be made on a patient-specific basis, perhaps using technology involved in the M3DIMAKER, a 3D printer that produces personalised medicines. The active drug, method and time of release, and even different drug combinations in one tablet could all, hypothetically, be altered to what each patient needs. 

Dentistry is currently the medical industry that makes the most use of 3D printing, and it’s uniquely suited to this process due to the limited range of printing sizes (a mouth can only be so wide). Certain products can even be batch produced, reducing waiting times for the patient. 3D printing also makes many processes easier, for example to print a retainer, the dentist only needs to wave a digital scanner over the teeth, compared to the “negative moulding” technique involving waiting for a gelatine mixture pressed into the teeth to harden (if you’ve ever experienced this, you’ll know that any way of avoiding this is one to be celebrated).