As we often do in our blog, we talk today about 3D printing, convinced that it is a real huge technological advance who made possible things we could not even imagine until a few years ago.
The globalization of this technology will help in rapid generation of prototyping tools, which will necessarily reduce costs and time in the research process. In the meanwhile, 3d printing has already various industrial and commercial uses: from architecture, aerospace, automotive safety and medical technology.
Between all the revolutionary creations that a printable world has made possible, the impact 3d printing has in medical technology it is simply amazing.
In the following video, we are going to see some of the greatest use of 3d printing applied to medical use: the printing of body parts such as robot hands.
There are so many uses of 3d printing in the medical sector, and by now we know that this technology is extremely important when making prosthetics that perfectly fit the human body. Printing body parts (such as robot hands or ears like we saw in the video), printing organs: thanks to this progress we can actually talk about “medical revolution”.
One of the latest news from the medical front and 3d printing technology is from last May: a team of scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) used a three-dimensional (3D) bio printing technique to make artificial blood vessels.
The creation of artificial tissues is not itself a news, but the study’s lead author Dr. Ali Khademhosseini (biomedical engineer and director of BWH Biomaterials Innovation Research Center (Research Center for Biomaterials) commented it is much harder to create artificial blood vessels.
As the same scientist affirms, 3d printing is essential for the development of tissues for transplant tailored to the needs of each patient, so it is clear that this is only a step more on the big medical revolution.
In conclusion we could say that, as a matter of fact, 3Dprinting seems limitless in what it can produce; we would say that with 3D printing the only limitation is the imagination.
Proof of the big impact this technology is having for healthcare, besides social and economic growth of modern society, the recognition won at the last European Inventor award 2014 by Charles W. Hull (under the non-European countries category), creator of 3d printing (stereolitography, more precisely), holder of more than 16 patents in the US and 20 in Europe, reinforcing the very importance of Industrial Property rights for inventors and researchers.
