From Pullman Washington
Look up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s a plane…….oops, wrong intro
It looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone.
And it came off an inkjet printer.
And it came off an inkjet printer.
Washington State University researchers have used a 3D printer to create
a bone-like material and structure that can be used in orthopedic
procedures, dental work, and to deliver medicine for treating
osteoporosis. Paired with actual bone, it acts as a scaffold for new
bone to grow on and ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill effects.
The authors report on successful in vitro tests in the journal Dental Materials and
say they’re already seeing promising results with in vivo tests on rats
and rabbits. It’s possible that doctors will be able to custom order
replacement bone tissue in a few years, says Susmita Bose,co-author and
a professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.
“If
a doctor has a CT scan of a defect,we can convert it to a CAD file and
make the scaffold according to the defect,” Bose says.
a bone-like material and structure that can be used in orthopedic
procedures, dental work, and to deliver medicine for treating
osteoporosis. Paired with actual bone, it acts as a scaffold for new
bone to grow on and ultimately dissolves with no apparent ill effects.
The authors report on successful in vitro tests in the journal Dental Materials and
say they’re already seeing promising results with in vivo tests on rats
and rabbits. It’s possible that doctors will be able to custom order
replacement bone tissue in a few years, says Susmita Bose,co-author and
a professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering.
“If
a doctor has a CT scan of a defect,we can convert it to a CAD file and
make the scaffold according to the defect,” Bose says.
The material grows out of a four-year interdisciplinary effort involving
chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing. A main finding
of the paper is that the addition of silicon and zinc more than doubled
the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate. Theresearchers
also spent a year optimizing a commercially available ProMetal 3D
printer designed to make metal objects.
The printer works by having
an inkjet spray a plastic binder over a bed of powder in layers of 20
microns, about half the width of a human hair. Following a computer’s
directions, it creates a channeled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser.
After just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold was supporting a network of new bone cells.
chemistry, materials science, biology and manufacturing. A main finding
of the paper is that the addition of silicon and zinc more than doubled
the strength of the main material, calcium phosphate. Theresearchers
also spent a year optimizing a commercially available ProMetal 3D
printer designed to make metal objects.
The printer works by having
an inkjet spray a plastic binder over a bed of powder in layers of 20
microns, about half the width of a human hair. Following a computer’s
directions, it creates a channeled cylinder the size of a pencil eraser.
After just a week in a medium with immature human bone cells, the scaffold was supporting a network of new bone cells.
