3D Printing – Lifeboat News: The Blog

Feb 20
2016

Army selects 3D printed unmanned aircraft systems concept for future experiment

ABERDEEN PROVING GROUND, Md. (Feb. 5, 2016) — Each year, the U.S. Army conducts a series of technology demonstrations known as the Army Expeditionary Warrior Experiments, or AEWE. The event is the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command’s live, force-on-force experiment.

AEWE places technologies under development by industry and Army researchers into the hands of Soldiers for early and credible feedback from the end-user.

In January, the AEWE 2017 team selected a project submitted by the U.S. Army Research Laboratory for inclusion in its next round of experimentation: On-Demand Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or UAS. It is one of 50 technologies slotted to participate in the experiment with 14 from government researchers and 36 from industry.

Feb 17
2016

Scientists Can Now 3D Print Otzi The Mummified Ice Man

Re-creating the Ice Man — 3D Printer Style.

Otzi, for those not up on their 5,300-year-old mummified men, died and was frozen in the Alps near Hauslabjoch on the border between Austria and Italy. His body is one of the best preserved human mummies in Europe and now he’s getting a 3D-printed makeover.

Researchers and engineers have worked together with 3D-printing firm Materialise to perfectly scan Otzi. This allows researchers to 3D print his tortured frame over and over again and, in an interesting episode of Nova, an artist will create a perfect replica of the mummy for study by researchers and potential museum-goers. Otzi, for his part, his hanging out in a climate-controlled vault in Italy so he doesn’t degenerate.

The engineers had to recreate some of Otzi’s parts from scratch, a feat possible thanks to 3D modeling techniques. From the release:

Feb 17
2016

The First 3D Bioprinter That Can Print Body Parts for Large Scale Human Implantation

After 10 years of development, the Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine has finally unveiled a 3D printer that can craft simple tissues, such as cartilage, into complex shapes suitable for implantation.

The printer uses cartridges filled with biodegradable plastic and human cells bound in gel form, and it can grow muscle, cartilage, and even bone. When implanted into animals, these crafted tissues have been shown to survive and even thrive for an indefinite amount of time.

“This is the first [bioprinter] that can print tissue at the large scales relevant for human implantation,” lead scientist behind the project, Anthony Atala, says in the release. “Basically, once we’ve printed a structure, we can keep it alive for several weeks before we implant it. Now the next step is to test these [printed tissues] for safety so we can implant them in the future in patients.”

Feb 16
2016

This 3D ‘Bioprinter’ Creates Ears, Muscles

A team at Wake Forest University has used a combination of living cells and a special gel to print out living human body parts — including ears, muscles and jawbones.

It’s an advance on previous attempts, which either involved making a plastic scaffold and then trying to get cells to grow in and on it, or that printed out organ shapes that ended up being too floppy and dying.

Feb 16
2016

Doctors 3D-print ‘living’ body parts

Custom-made, living body parts have been 3D-printed in a significant advance for regenerative medicine, say scientists.

The sections of bone, muscle and cartilage all functioned normally when implanted into animals.

The breakthrough, published in Nature Biotechnology, raises the hope of using living tissues to repair the body.

Feb 16
2016

‘Bioprinter’ creates bespoke lab-grown body parts for transplant

A bioprinter – a three dimensional printer that uses living cells in suspension as its ink, and injection nozzles that can follow a CT scan blueprint – brings the dream of transplant surgery a step nearer: a bespoke body part grown in a laboratory and installed by a robot surgeon.

Scientists and clinicians began exploring tissue culture for transplant surgery more than 20 years ago. But researchers in the US report in Nature Biotechnology that they have harnessed a sophisticated, custom-designed 3D printer to print living muscle, cartilage and bone to repair battlefield injury.

The printed body parts so far have been tested only in laboratory animals. But tested organs have the size, structure and function for human use: once transplanted, they could be colonized by blood vessels and begin to grow and renew themselves normally. The study was backed by the US Armed Forces Institute for Regenerative Medicine.

Feb 15
2016

3D bioprinter can add vessels to artificial body parts

Researchers say they’ve developed a 3-D bioprinter that can create artificial body parts with ready-made channels for getting nutrients and oxygen to the implanted cells. If the technology can be perfected, the device could solve one of the biggest obstacles to creating 3D-printed organs: how to nourish masses of manufactured tissue.

“It can fabricate stable, human-scale tissue of any shape,” Anthony Atala, director of the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine in North Carolina, said in a news release. “With further development, this technology could potentially be used to print living tissue and organ structures for surgical implantation.”

Atala and his colleagues describe their experiments with the bioprinter, known as the Integrated Tissue-Organ Printing System or ITOP, in a study published today by Nature Biotechnology.

Feb 14
2016

Mattel Is Making a $300 3D Printing Toy Studio For Kids

Great gift for kids and getting them started with 3D printing to boot.

One of the world’s largest toy makers, Mattel, has long embraced the idea of helping kids build their own toys. Back in the 1960s, the company released the very first ThingMaker, which let kids create figurines by pouring liquid plastic into molds and then heating them up in an oven. Now, Mattel thinks it can bring back the toymaker movement with its own affordable 3D printer.

Feb 10
2016

Singapore Makes Plans to 3D Print Public Housing

In a world of economic scarcity, public housing has become essential for sheltering our species’ most vulnerable populations. Interestingly, the island city-state of Sinagpore having a unique approach to public housing, with 80% of the resident population living in government buildings and, more than that, the small nation implemented some housing practices that the United States has sometimes been too afraid to tackle when it comes to public housing: socioeconomically integrated public developments. Now, Singapore is moving beyond these important strategies to novel methods of construction, namely 3D printing.

sinagpore's public housing

The Singapore Centre for 3D Printing, established with $107.7 million in government and industry funding, is in the process of working with a company to test the feasibility of 3D printing public housing units storey by storey, off-site, before assembling them at their destination. Professor Chua Chee Kai, Executive Director of the Singapore Centre for 3D Printing tells GovInsider, “The idea is to print them maybe a unit at a time. So if you have a 10 storey building, you will probably do one storey at a time. These will be transported to the construction site where they will be stacked up like lego.”

Feb 9
2016

NYC Startup Aims to 3D Print Bones with Patients‘ Own Stem Cells

When the idea of a medical transplant is brought up, most people’s thoughts are usually drawn to procedures such as blood transfusions or organ replacements. But, oftentimes, we forget the importance of our bone structure, as well as the 2 million painful bone transplants that take place every year around world. Previously stuck in a Medieval-like operation method, surgeons had little option but to replace their patients’ bones with the bones of animals or human cadavers, and even this procedure can oftentimes led to complications due to the body’s rejection of the foreign replacement. But 3D bioprinting has been a major influence in changing the entire nature of this traditional surgical procedure, new methods of creating bone grafts have been developed by researchers around the world from Montana State University to Tokyo. 3D printing has become a recent revelation in skeletal reconstruction surgery, with 3D printed synthetic implants and even harvested stem cell materials proving to be a much safer and efficient surgical alternative.