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I run the Engineering Prototypes and Implants for Children Lab, also known as the EPIC Lab, which is based in Kids Research at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, in Sydney, Australia. The focus of the EPIC Lab is to use 3D technology to develop pediatric medical devices with the goal of improving children’s lives. Combining my background in engineering and science with our clinical and academic leads, Professor David Little (pediatric orthopedic surgeon) and Professor Joshua Burns (Professor of pediatric neuromuscular rehabilitation), our work is driven by needs in the medical and surgical care of children. We are lucky to be co-located with the Children’s Hospital at Westmead, which enables us to work closely with many varied healthcare professionals on the frontline of children’s care. Our interdisciplinary team includes engineers, scientists, designers, and clinicians, who are all driven by the goal of making children’s lives better. 

At the EPIC Lab, we have 2 main research programs. The first focuses on the prototyping and commercialization of orthopedic implants for children and the second is on developing 3D printed ankle-foot orthoses for children. In addition to these, we also use 3D printing in the context of pre-surgical visualization, simulation models, and medical education. Our projects are largely driven by clinicians approaching us with challenges in their practice. We aim to solve these challenges collaboratively with short iterative design cycles, ensuring we are fulfilling the needs of our users. Our user-focused approach includes more than just the clinician, but also the patient, allied health professionals or any other critical cog in treatment.

There are many considerations that impact the design and function of medical devices for children more so than adults. It sounds corny, but children are not just small adults! Children have specific needs and simply scaling down the size of an adult device may not be appropriate. An example is to consider the way that children’s bones grow. In our program of developing orthopedic implants for children, it is critical that our devices are compatible with skeletal growth. Our pipeline of orthopedic devices either allows for continued growth during implantation or they take advantage of the growth in children’s bones to gradually correct deformities. 

Another critical factor for children’s medical devices is timely delivery, where the right device needs to be received at the right time. This is particularly important in assistive devices, including orthoses like ankle-foot orthoses (AFOs). AFOs are usually personalized thermoplastic braces worn around the foot and ankle that are prescribed to improve the ability to walk and the daily function of children and adults with neuromuscular and musculoskeletal disorders. Children are constantly growing out of their devices, which means that the efficient delivery of any assistive device is important to ensure continued mobility and function. For our research program on 3D printed ankle-foot orthoses AFOs, called Printhotics, we are focusing on improving the efficiency of the workflow to ensure the children can receive optimized devices as quick as possible. 

None of these research projects would be possible without access to 3D technologies like 3D scanning, computer-aided design, and 3D printing. Relatively cheap and easy access to these technologies enables the rapid development of new solutions from the ground up. The most rewarding part of my role is seeing the impact of empowering clinicians and collaborating with them to create solutions to challenges in their daily practice. 3D technologies have significantly lowered the barrier to entry for the development of new medical devices and I am so excited to see what amazing innovations will come from this.

About the Author:

Dr. Tegan Cheng is a biomedical engineer and medical scientist at the EPIC Lab, Kids Research at the Children’s Hospital at Westmead. She works closely with clinicians to develop novel solutions to address unmet needs in pediatrics. Her main research areas are the development and commercialization of medical devices for children’s musculoskeletal conditions and the application of 3D printing to improve health outcomes for children. 

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Want to write a piece for 3DHEALS Expert Corner? Email us: info@3dheals.com

Polymer and biopolymer derived hydrogels are ideal for replicating human tissue (the extracellular matrix of which is itself a hydrogel).

The fabrication and reproduction of human tissue for medical training and diagnostic purposes is a costly but critical component of quality healthcare. Tubular constructs represent a common type of structure in human anatomy and include renal, vascular, pulmonary, and gastrointestinal tissues. Tubular constructs are geometrically simple, but the fabrication of these structures is still a challenge. Synthetic vessels—composed of biological hydrogels such as collagen—are currently fabricated by casting or rolling a polymeric material around a mandrel, wherein the diameter of this mandrel dictates the size of the lumen. This approach can yield tubular constructs with biological and mechanical properties that are comparable to human blood vessels. However, these approaches are challenged by the cost, as well as the fabrication of small lumen diameters (<1 mm) and arbitrary length tubes (>10 mm).

We recently reported a methodology (in collaboration with the Theberge laboratory at the University of Washington) to fabricate hydrogel-based tubular conduits based on the extrusion of shear-thinning hydrogels from a customizable 3D printed coaxial nozzle.

Different nozzle geometries can be modeled via computer-aided design (CAD) and 3D printed in order to generate tubes or coaxial filaments with different cross-sectional geometries. We were able to fabricate tubes with luminal diameters or wall thicknesses as small as ~ 150 µm. Moreover, these tubes can be functionalized with collagen I to enable cell adhesion, and human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVECs) can be cultured on the luminal surfaces of these tubes to yield tubular endothelial monolayers. Our approach enables the rapid fabrication of biofunctional hydrogel conduits which can ultimately be utilized for engineering in vitro models of tubular biological structures, such as blood vessels.

This is just one example that demonstrates how 3D printing is poised to change how we think about research and products of the future. Coaxial nozzles, such as the one we designed, can be rapidly designed and produced via SLA printing within a manner of hours. Without a 3D printer in house, a materials laboratory like ours could not have produced such nozzles without a significant amount of time and investment into machining and assembling individual parts. We hope to make our own designs widely available. Thus, in the spirit of the openness of the 3D printing community, the STEP and STL files of our nozzles are available for those interested in printing their own.

About the Nelson Laboratory: The Nelson laboratory develops stimuli-responsive materials and bio-hybrid materials that are compatible with additive manufacturing (AM) processes. They particularly focus on developing materials for AM that can impact applications in the life sciences.

Reference:

3D printed coaxial nozzles for the extrusion of hydrogel tubes toward modeling vascular endothelium

About the Author:

Alshakim Nelson is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Washington. He received his Ph.D. in organic chemistry from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2004, where he worked with Sir J. Fraser Stoddart on carbohydrate-containing polymers and macrocycles. He was then an NIH postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology working for Professor Robert Grubbs on olefin metathesis catalysts for the formation of supramolecular ensembles. Dr. Nelson joined IBM Almaden Research Center in 2005 as a Research Staff Member where he focused on the synthesis of nanomaterial building blocks that enabled large area nanomanufacturing via self-assembly. In 2015, Dr. Nelson joined the faculty at the UW, where his research group focuses on the synthesis, characterization, and processing of stimuli-responsive hydrogels for 3D printing. Dr. Nelson has over 40 publications and 11 issued patents. His honors and awards include recognition as an IBM Master Inventor, ACS PMSE Young Investigator, Kavli Foundation Fellow, NSF CAREER award, and 3M Non-Tenured Faculty Award.

Author’s Representative Publications:

Wong, J.; Gong, A. T.; Defnet, P. A.; Meabe, L.; Beauchamp, B.; Sweet, R. M.; Sardon, H.; Cobb, C. L.; Nelson, A. 3D Printing ionogel auxetic frameworks for stretchable sensors. Adv. Mater. Technol. 2019, 4, 1900452.

Shafranek, R. T.; Leger, J. D.; Zhang, S.; Khalil, M.; Gu, X.; Nelson, A. Sticky ends in a self-assembling ABA triblock copolymer: the role of ureas in stimuli-responsive hydrogels. Mol. Sys. Des. Eng. 2019, 4, 91.

Fellin, C. R.; Adelmund, S. M.; Karis, D. G.; Shafranek, R. T.; Ono, R. J.; Martin, C. G.; Johnston, T. G.; DeForest, C. A.; Nelson, A. Tunable temperature- and shear-responsive hydrogels based on poly(alkyl glycidyl ether)s. Polym. Int. 2019, 68, 1238.

Saha, A.; Johnston, T. G.; Shafranek, R. T.; Goodman, C. J.; Zalatan, J. G.; Storti, D. W.; Ganter, M. A.; Nelson, A. Additive manufacturing of catalytically active living materials. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2018, 10, 13373.

Basu, A.; Saha, A.; Goodman, C.; Shafranek, R. T.; Nelson, A. Catalytically initiated gel-in-gel printing of composite hydrogels. ACS Appl. Mater. Interfaces 2017, 9, 40898.

Karis, D. G.; Ono, R. J.; Zhang, M.; Vora, A.; Storti, D.; Ganter, M. A.; Nelson, A. Cross-linkable multi-stimuli responsive hydrogel inks for direct-write 3D printing. Polym. Chem. 2017, 8, 4199.

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The post 3D Printing Coaxial Nozzles Enabling Rapid Fabrication of Biofunctional Hydrogel Conduits appeared first on 3DHeals.

July 25th, 2019 (San Francisco)

This is our second online pitch session including four 3D printing, bioprinting, and adjacent technologies, such as digital dentistry using 3D scanning, regenerative medicine, and tissue engineering. Startups typically pitch directly to institutional VCs and selected angel investors knowledgeable to the field. We plan to host this kind of online pitch on an approximately quarterly basis to keep the quality of selected startups high. Interested startups can apply here:

Nanochon: http://www.nanochon.com/
Using 3-D printing and novel material, the Nanochon implant is a sturdy medical advancement that is both an orthopedic load-bearing implant as well a tissue growth scaffold. 

I-Dentical: https://www.identicalimplant.com/
Our drill-free, non-invasive dental implants can be placed by any family dentist, making tooth replacement more accessible and affordable for EVERYONE.

Revital Therapeutics:  https://www.revitaltx.com/home
Revital Therapeutics is a tissue engineering company bringing innovative approaches to the regenerative medicine field and groundbreaking products to the clinic.

Volumetric: https://volumetricbio.com/
Volumetric, Inc. was founded in 2018 by Jordan Miller and Bagrat Grigoryan. Our mission is to empower the next generation of advanced biofabrication with high-quality materials and systems for 3D bioprinting.

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The post Pitch3D July 2019 Nanochon, Revital Therapeutics, Volumetric, iDentical appeared first on 3DHeals.

On the early morning of 5/31/2019, we had our first successful online Pitch3D event. This event is set to be recurrent each month, aiming to create an opportunity for early-stage startups in the realm of healthcare 3D printing, bioprinting, and advanced materials to have first meetings with a curated panel institutional investors. The presentations are meant to be short (10 minutes max.) but aim to get to the bottom line quickly to stage a second 1:1 meeting that would be more in depth and longer with interested investors. The online format also avoids the opportunity cost of the investor-startup meeting due to time and geographic barriers. To pitch in our future sessions, the application is here. To be included in our investor mailing list, you must be qualified institutional investors, please email us directly: info@3dheals.com.

Our live Pitch3D session will occur concurrently with 3DHEALS event globally. Next live Pitch3D will be in Boston on July 18th, 2019. The application is here.

Presenting Startups Summary:

8:00-8:15 AM Deep Health (Isreal)
Deep Health uses advanced AI tools to change the way surgery is planned and done. We are currently concentrating on Spine surgeries due to the complexity of the procedure. 3D Scanning. Software.

8:15-8:30 AM Kumovis (Munich, Germany)

KUMOVIS develops 3D-printing systems for medical applications. Our system is designed to manufacture a high variety of medical products starting from prototyping up to personalized human implants. h

8:30-8:45 AM PrinterPrezz (Fremont, USA)

PrinterPrezz brings together an operating room and advanced
manufacturing expertise under one roof.

8:45- 9:00 AM Fluidform (Boston, USA)

Fluidform 3D printing builds the additive manufacturing platform for 3D printing silicone, 3D bioprinting, and more.

Related Articles:

3DHeals Brazil: Healthcare 3D Printing Next Generation!

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The post Pitch3D May 2019: Deep Health; Kumovis; PrinterPrezz; Fluidform appeared first on 3DHeals.