TCT Magazine
Amid the swell of congratulatory remarks – words like ‘fantastic’ and ‘awesome’ complementing the likes and love hearts on social media posts – one comment stands out: “A powerhouse group of super innovators.”
The words were left under a post about the five people on the front cover of this very magazine; our finalists for this year’s TCT Women in 3D Printing Innovator Award.
Now in its third year, our annual call to the public to nominate female innovators who are leading the charge in additive manufacturing (AM), collected more nominations than ever before. And after much deliberation between TCT and Women in 3D Printing, our nominees gathered at the TIPE 3D Printing Conference in January – converged across time zones and industries – to discuss their journeys into AM and how they’re each championing the technology today.
THE ADDITIVE ENTREPRENEUR
Kate Black is a multidisciplinary researcher and Professor of Manufacturing at the University of Liverpool, focused on elevating the AM industry through chemistry and collaboration. A strong advocate for a more diverse workforce to “create innovation in manufacturing,” Dr Black is also a campaigner for greater diversity in the STEM workforce. In 2013, she founded LivWISE (Liverpool Women in Science & Engineering) to support and promote women in STEM.
But Dr Black is also an entrepreneur. In 2019, she co-founded the university spin-out Meta Additive Limited, which was later acquired by Desktop Metal.
It was Dr Black’s background in chemistry that enabled the development of a new approach to 3D printing metals that found its roots in atomic layer deposition and chemical vapour deposition, to address the limitations of metal binder jetting. That, plus a strong team made up of collaborators from different industries and backgrounds, as Dr Black shared.
“Having a great technology is only part of it and it's only part of [getting it] to commercialisation,” she elaborated.
“Really, it's all about people and team. And if you don't have the right people in the right team, great innovation can get squashed. So, for me, it was that synergy of having a good technology but also having a great team to take it to market.”
The technology itself utilises non-sacrificial functional binders to eliminate challenges around porosity, shrinkage, size limitations and production speeds associated with current binder jetting processes. With this novel chemical approach, translating organometallic expertise into additive manufacturing, and specialising in materials, Dr Black says the aim is to broaden the palette of materials that can be processed with AM.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
“I think that allowed me to come at it from a different angle,” Dr Black explained. “I'm a real firm believer that, particularly in manufacturing and additive manufacturing, we need to take people from all the seemingly disparate disciplines, so people from chemistry or physics or biology, and see what they do to turn it on its head, because to me, everything is about materials. If you don't have the materials, you can have the most amazing machines, you can have amazing software but if you don’t have the materials to put into it, then you're not going to manufacture anything.”
THE MATERIALS-MAVEN
Jessica Drazba holds in her hand an Adidas running shoe featuring a latticed midsole. It’s perhaps the most famous example of 3D printing in a consumer-facing end-use product and was enabled by the work done by Drazba’s team at Silicon Valley AM company Carbon on 3D printable elastomeric resins.
Echoing Dr Black’s comments on the value of materials development, Drazba said: “It doesn't matter how fancy your printer is, it doesn't matter how elegant the software is. Those are helpful to making a good part but, really, the materials at the end of the day are what’s super important.”
With a background in chemistry and an interest in two-photon absorption and stereolithography, it was Carbon’s now famous Terminator 2-inspired TED Talk that inspired her to join the company in 2015. As Director of Resin Product Development, Drazba leads a team responsible for the development and commercialisation process for new resins using Carbon’s Digital Light Synthesis technology. This process, as Drazba explains, is crucial to getting new materials into the hands of users.
“A cool resin invention is exciting but without a proper commercialisation process, it's just that, it's just an invention. It's not actually a resin product that a customer can use,” Drazba said. “My team is involved in making sure that all the inventions that come to light for Carbon actually become real products.”
For Carbon, those real products span from sporting goods to oral health. Materials, whether elastomerics for impact resistance on the football field or rigid materials for HVAC components in automotive, are at the heart. For those new applications to grow, Drazba believes more attention needs to be put on the unique value AM can bring in terms of speed to market, design freedom and improved performance, compared to traditional methods like injection moulding. The other challenge is education.
“You need to have engineers that are thinking about different ways of manufacturing,” Drazba said. “Whether it's a midsole, medical device, dental applications, industrial parts, if additive isn't in their toolbox of design tools, then opportunities are going to get missed.
“I think education, starting all the way from the high school level through college and graduate school, and also just industrially, everyone needs to be aware that additive manufacturing can be a viable technology.”
LISTEN to the full panel discussion on this bonus episode of the Additive Insight podcast.
THE IMPLANTS INNOVATOR
In addition to consumer-facing products, healthcare is perhaps the most effective AM application area when it comes to communicating the technology’s impact in the real world. At the forefront of this is Alba Gonzalez-Alvarez, a doctor in Biomedical Engineering with nearly a decade of experience collaborating with surgeons, engineers, and researchers on the development of hundreds of 3D printed custom medical devices that have been successfully implanted into patients.
Today, Dr Gonzalez-Alvarez is leading a European Marie Curie Conex+ project on the development of medical devices at University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain, in association with several European hospitals. The team uses engineering analysis to validate new designs and establish workflows for every type of implant developed. These devices are 3D printed in a range of biocompatible materials, typically using powder bed fusion for metallic implants but also working with biopolymers for dental applications and anatomical models.
This knowledge has rapidly sped up the development time for such complex devices, as Dr Gonzalez-Alvarez explained: “We have developed a great range of implant designs that we have biomechanically tested and validated and therefore, we can now use that knowledge to design and create new implants within weeks.”
Dr Gonzalez-Alvarez's motivation, to improve patients’ lives by using advanced engineering tools and 3D printing, shines through. And never more than when she talks to the importance of providing hospitals with the services required for the development of custom implants for patients in need of surgical solutions.
“We are really lucky we have developed implants to reconstruct almost any part of the body,” Dr Gonzalez-Alvarez said. “Really very complex reconstructions, from head and neck to orthopaedics, thoracic surgery, femurs, tibias, hips. Last week, we had a really complex patient that we operated on in Italy for a very complex hip reconstruction; a patient that would have not been operated on unless a custom implant [could be] created for him. So, that process from design to implantation, it's a process that is usually carried out under a lot of pressure as you have to meet surgery deadlines, and you have to organise the work of disciplinary teams within the therapeutic window of the patient, and the work of clinicians, engineers, manufacturers, etc. But it is a really special time when you see a patient get better because of the work done together.”
THE CROSS-INDUSTRY CHAMPION
Exemplifying what can be achieved with this kind of multi-disciplinary collaboration, Dr Parastoo Jamshidi has been researching how AM design flexibility can bring additional functionality to patient-specific implants. Having spent the last nine years exploring multiple techniques and materials including plastics, metals, ceramics, hydrogels, and composites, Dr Jamshidi is today taking those learnings and applying them to completely new industries through a knowledge transfer partnership with Birminghambased jewellery company Cooksongold. Here, she is helping to diversify its business model into emerging industrial sectors, specifically with precious metals.
“I’m trying to now investigate the application of the precious metal for different fields, for instance, medical and industrial. So, we are working on volume production of industrial components, for instance, but they're all the same concept, we are working on a different design," Dy Jamshidi explained. "We are also trying to expand the sectors in the jewellery company for medical applications because we know that precious metals are very important for dental and medical applications by very small incorporation of the precious metal because precious metals are very expensive. So, it's probably not a good idea to print the whole thing with a precious metal, but a very small amount of precious metal into the main matrix, for instance, titanium or cobalt chromium or copper, that might actually make a big difference, to create a new component for medical or dental applications.”
Following her PhD in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Birmingham, Dr Jamshidi joined the university’s Advanced Materials Processing (AMPLab) group to explore 3D printing in tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. It was here where access to metal 3D printing enabled her to use her skills in biomedical to explore 3D printing of customised, patientspecific medical implants. That thread of sharing expertise across industries and specialities is also woven through Dr Jamshidi’s work here, working closely with industry, clinicians, and researchers, “to connect all the expertise together to be able to help the patients for a better quality of life.” And for those patient-specific medical implants, the value to patient, and to wider healthcare infrastructures, cannot be overlooked.
“That helps to minimise a lot of costs for the NHS because you will minimise a lot of rejection from the patient’s body,” Dr Jamshidi explained. “By using 3D printing and creating customised parts for the patient, you can actually decrease the NHS costs as well as the patient discomfort.”
THE HEALTHCARE TRAILBLAZER
For Beth Ripley, the journey to AM began in radiology, just as 3D printing was beginning to gain traction in the medical field. When a need for greater communication to describe the complex anatomies and pathologies shown in patient imaging to surgery teams and patients presented itself, Ripley questioned whether they could take patient 3D data sets, that would typically be condensed into 2D images, and bring it back into the 3D world. Now specialising in translating medical imaging into virtual and 3D printed models to help the way doctors and patients understand and treat disease, the answer was yes.
“If you put the actual patient anatomy back in the hands of the surgeons, they would get it in seconds,” Ripley said. “The amount of information transfer and communication that would happen in that moment is just amazing.”
Beth Ripley MD, PhD is the Deputy Chief for the Office of Healthcare Innovation and Learning for the Veterans Health Administration and is an Associate Professor of Radiology at the University of Washington School of Medicine. Overseeing the enterprise-wide VHA Office of Advance Manufacturing, the goal is for every VA Medical Center to have access to 3D printing services to provide patientspecific healthcare to all 9 million veterans. To date, there are 3D printing capabilities in 99 hospitals across the VA network.
“There's a lot of training that goes into this, there's a lot of engineering that's required,” Ripley said of making this a reality. “Bringing researchers, engineers, clinical staff together is a feat. But the amazing thing about hospitals is, it's a great place to do that. And of course, our industry partners too.”
Ensuring the technology reaches the people and places it needs to, VHA has another mission too: to share its learnings with the general public.
“We've been working on a playbook to help explain how to do this point of care manufacturing,” Ripley explained. “It’s kind of in its early iterations, but you'll see us hit those three themes: training and getting the right people to the table; getting the printers in, in a safe environment; and then probably the most challenging, but most exciting for us as an industry, is building that digital infrastructure that's going to allow us to share and move files either between ourselves within our own organisation or across the ocean to my colleagues in Europe and beyond, and making sure that's trusted and safe and verified.”
On June 7th, 2023 in Birmingham, UK, one of these five innovators will be named the third recipient of the TCT Wi3DP Innovator Award, following in the footsteps of Prof. Wai Yee Yeong of the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and Eliana Fu, Industry Manager at TRUMPF.
