Upcoming Events
Next-Gen 3D Printed Orthotics and Prosthetics
Apply to speak or sponsor the event: info@3dheals.comSubscribe here to receive event emails. Registration Speakers: Jade Ward Jade is the Research Development...
3HEALS & BioTools Innovator At JPM 2027
At the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference in January 2027, 3DHEALS and Biotools Innovator will co-host an exclusive reception tailored specifically for founders and investors in the biotools sector....
Post-Processing : The Last Piece of Puzzle?
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The Latest...
Where 3D Printing Actually Makes Money | The Lattice Brief (10/19/26)
This week's Lattice Brief asks where 3D printing actually makes money: the listed printer makers lose money, while treatments with printing inside, medical software, consumables ecosystems and...
Which 3D Printing Businesses Are Profitable? A Healthcare Focus in 2026
Short answer: In 2026, the most profitable 3D printing businesses mostly do not sell 3D printers. Margins concentrate in four models: treatments with printing built in (Align Technology, hearing...
Episode #130 | 3D Print Tiny Things with Adam Steege, Trio Labs
The more minimally invasive medicine becomes, the smaller and more complex medical devices have to be. While that can mean better care and greater access for patients, it also creates a significant...
The Pharmacy Wants to Be the Factory | The Lattice Brief (10/11/26)
This week's Lattice Brief looks at three bets on printing medicines in the pharmacy: PharmaTher's CraftMake roll-out to US compounding pharmacies, CurifyLabs' dose-accuracy work, and France's first...
3D Printed Drugs - Guide (Updated 10-12-2026)
3D-printed drugs are medicines made layer by layer, allowing you to tailor each tablet's dose, shape, and release profile to a single patient, sometimes combining several drugs into one tablet. This...
China Is Printing More of Everything | The Lattice Brief (10/4/26)
This week: China's additive manufacturing build-out and what it means for medicine, a France-licensed supply chain for 3D-printed drugs, an FDA call for new evidence pathways, a randomized trial for...
Expert's Corner
Which 3D Printing Businesses Are Profitable? A Healthcare Focus in 2026
Short answer: In 2026, the most profitable 3D printing businesses mostly do not sell 3D printers. Margins concentrate in four models: treatments with printing built in (Align Technology, hearing aids, etc.), medical software and services (Materialise Medical), ecosystems that sell recurring consumables (Formlabs), and devices priced on clinical value (FDA-cleared implants). Industrial printer hardware remains the least profitable part of the industry. A note on scope: this analysis leans toward the medical sector. That is 3DHEALS' focus, and it is also where the margin evidence points. Industrial and consumer companies appear mainly for comparison.
China is printing more of everything. Is that a problem?
In 2026, China is turning 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, into a mass-production industry. A new Ganzhou plant can build up to 50 metal printers a month, and Chinese makers exported 2.46 million consumer printers in the first four months of the year. The shift is now reaching medical 3D printing.
More Downloads Than DeepSeek: AI Model for Materials
DiffractGPT, an open artificial intelligence (AI) model for materials design, has been downloaded roughly 240,000 times on Hugging Face “more than DeepSeek”, told its creator to the room during our recent 3DHEALS virtual event Biomaterials Frontier for Medical 3DPrinting. That creator is Kamal Choudhary, a materials scientist at Johns Hopkins University and a research associate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). In fifteen minutes, he laid out what AI can already do in materials discovery: JARVIS, the open materials database he built at NIST; ALIGNN, a graph neural network that predicts material properties; and AtomGPT, a “ChatGPT for materials”. That said, almost none of these can directly benefit bioinks, implantable biomaterials, or medical 3D printing community. This article explains what AI-driven materials design can do today, why biology is the bottleneck, and where the commercial opportunity sits for bioprinting and medical device companies.
Metamaterial and 3D Printing
Metamaterials could be one of the most consequential ideas in materials science, and 3D printing is what turned them from theory into objects you can hold, implant, and build a company around. This piece explains what they are, how the field has evolved, and why they matter for medicine's future. Unlike conventional materials like wood or metal, which derive their properties from their atomic structure, metamaterials derive their unique properties from their design at the microscopic or nanoscopic level. In other words, there could, in theory, be infinite kinds of metamaterials, not limited by natural resources but only by human creativity. One recent example of a metamaterial is "auxetic materials" presented by Dr. Jeong Hun Park. (See video below.) Scientists create these materials by arranging small, often repeating structures (like tiny coils or patterns) in a specific way. The precise structure allows metamaterials to manipulate waves, such as light or sound, or mechanical forces in unusual ways.
Regulator-Legible Material Systems: The Real Frontier in 3D-Printed Biomaterials
For most of the past decade, the story of 3D printing in medicine was a story about shape. Patient-specific anatomy, impossible geometries, surgical guides tailored to a single body, frequently touted as "complexity for free". The printer's magic was that it could make forms that would be impossible or very expensive to make by mold injection. In 2026, the center of gravity has moved. The defining question is no longer "What shape can we print?" but rather "What material can we print, and will a regulator ever accept it?" That shift has a name worth adopting: the move toward regulator-legible material systems.
Better Isn't Billable: How a New (3D-Printed) Medical Device Actually Gets Reimbursed
A biodegradable, 3D-printed pigtail stent for gastric leaks can be a valuable teaching tool for medical 3D-printed device entrepreneurs. This mental exercise with a recent novel design shows the reimbursement logic every device team should learn before they fall too deep in love with their own inventions. Medical device reimbursement in the United States often rewards factors other than clinical performance. A recent preprint makes the gap easy to see. It describes BRIDGE, a 3D-printed, biodegradable double-pigtail stent for draining gastric leaks after sleeve gastrectomy. The design is clever. Its lattice mid-section is built from a triply periodic minimal surface (TPMS). It bends around a radius that is roughly seven times tighter than that of a commercial biliary stent, without kinking. It drains about twice the fluid. And because it is printed from a biodegradable resin, it is designed to dissolve on its own rather than be removed during a second endoscopy.1
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