A lack of available materials. Arduous product development cycles. And a long route to market.
This is the diagnosis of 3D printing’s application in healthcare after an extensive examination by the University of Nottingham’s Centre for Additive Manufacturing (CfAM).
It delivered its analysis in January off the back of receiving a 6 million GBP grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ESPRC), which – the CfAM hopes – will go some way to providing the solution.
The CfAM’s aim is to develop a 3D printing toolkit that plots the course for those developing medical applications to go from research to development to clinical adoption.
“We’ve come to understand that there are some really difficult-to-overcome obstacles that are preventing wholesale adoption of 3D printing. The dream is that you see it everywhere, and you don’t,” Ricky Wildman, Professor in Chemical Engineering at the University of Nottingham, tells TCT. “One of the reasons for that is there aren’t the right materials available to meet the needs of particular products. So, somebody might come through in the healthcare industry and say, ‘I’ve got this great idea for a 3D printed product that’s going to deliver this new therapeutic gain,’ but when it comes to it, what material shall I use, and which material is going to be printable?
“You find, suddenly, that your scope is narrowed because there were only a few materials that are commonly used for 3D printing.”
The CfAM is home to around 100 people, a range of research projects, and two spin out groups. There exists a shared belief inside the CfAM lab that if you don’t ‘understand the science, processes and engineering’ around the technology, ‘then we’ll always be capped on what we can deliver.’
It also assesses the current application of 3D printing in the healthcare space to be ‘very powerful, but fairly simple in its construction.’ Applications that might fit these criteria include prosthetics or surgical models, those which carry some of the aforementioned hurdles but not enough to completely hold their development back. Where CfAM wants to have its initial impact with the toolkit is medical solutions that have more sophisticated functions, such as drug delivery or tissue regeneration.
“It’s sort of creeping in,” Wildman says of 3D printing in healthcare, “but we can see that it has a role in having a much deeper and wider role in making people’s lives better through better therapeutics, through better healthcare, through support functions.”
Over the next five years, the CfAM will endeavour to develop three ‘field-changing’ products, and in the process, build up the 3D printing toolkit so it can then be deployed on a host of other medical products – Boston Micro Fabrication will be among the CfAM’s advisors on this project. Those three initial products will be a biopill – an oral dosage form for delivering biologics; biocatalytic reactors that will help
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
to produce medicines efficiently; and an intestinal patch to address intestinal bowel disease.
Talking to the latter application, Wildman explains: “The idea is that we can build a patch that a surgeon can implant into the intestine and regenerate the tissue inside of the intestine. And that means quite a complex shape, quite a complex material – it has to be a graded material, it has to be tissue-like, it has to be able to support cells. It’s a complicated setup, a very challenging product that can only be made by 3D printing. We’re going to use that and say, ‘what are the challenges associated with making such a sophisticated product?’ and use that to create the toolkit.”
This, Wildman says, will help to inform the generation of the toolkit by tackling more challenging products first, allowing those involved in the project to work out what the necessary elements of the toolkit are. Once those elements have been established and implemented, the next step will be to take it to market.
University of Nottingham
3D printed biocatalytic reactor.
Once there, the CfAM anticipates a toolkit that is capable of providing a high throughput screening of materials to full function of the product. This screening will include the screening of a vast materials library to ascertain the best option for the product and its function, as well as the printability of the part(s). Computational screening tools are to be developed to speed the chemical screening of candidate materials up, while the CfAM also aims to integrate machine learning to rationalise the design process and ‘combine those promising materials in the right way.’
One of the key drivers of this toolkit is to take full advantage of multi-material inkjet technologies. Wildman cites the development of a joint prosthetic where a soft material is required in one area of the component that interacts with the soft tissue, and a hard material required in another where the part interfaces with the bone. It’s the belief of CfAM that, to really take advantage of the multi-material printing process, a toolkit to provide guidance on material selection and design is required.
“You want to be able to design it to have the right function, the right modulus, the right flexibility, but also have these other functions in there, which means that integrates with the tissue and, of course, is biocompatible,” Wildman says. “All this requires some kind of design framework and there are design tools out there for 3D printing already, but there are not very many for multi-materials. So, we want to be able to integrate our computational screening with our design tools that tell us where to put each of our materials and what the overall shape of our product is going to be.”
When the time comes, the CfAM expects not to spin out a business to drive the toolkit to market, but instead engage with a consortium, which includes deep tech innovation organisation CPI – part of the High Value Manufacturing Catapult in the UK. Through this consortium, the CfAM hopes to engage with as many medical businesses as it can, eventually integrating its toolkit IP into their manufacturing workflows.
“We’re hoping that, ultimately, the more companies that adopt this toolkit type approach, the more 3D printing products will get into clinical and get onto market,” Wildman finishes. “Our view is that 3D printing has much to offer the healthcare industry. The number one, I suppose, for the healthcare industry, is the fact that you can personalise and make it on-demand and bespoke, so when it comes to healthcare, personalised medicine is where it’s at. And additive manufacturing is perfectly placed to be able to deliver that personalised medicine. Our job is convincing industry and making it easy for industry to adopt that technology. It’s now about making that case and making it easy for industry to put it into clinic.”
