It
looks like bone. It feels like bone. For the most part, it acts like bone.
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 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,
coauthor and 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.
The
researchers—who include mechanical and materials engineering Professor
Amit Bandyopadhyay, doctoral student Gary Fielding, and research assistant Solaiman
Tarafder—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 um. 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.
The
research was funded with a $1.5 million grant from the National Institutes of
Health.
