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Medtronic to Acquire French Spinal Surgery Maker Medicrea, Strengthening 3D Printed Implants

As part of medical device maker Medtronic‘s push toward a fully integrated solution for surgical planning, the company announced its intent to acquire Medicrea, a French pioneer in innovative surgical technologies for the treatment of complex spinal pathologies, in a transaction valued at €7 ($8) per share. The all-cash agreement, set to purchase all of Medicrea’s outstanding shares, had unanimous approval by both companies and is expected to close by the end of 2020, subject to regulatory approvals and other customary closing conditions from both France and the United States.

Medtronic treats the first U.S. patients with spinal surgery robot (Image courtesy of Medtronic)

“Combining Medtronic’s innovative portfolio of spine implants, robotics, navigation, and 3D imaging technology with Medicrea’s capabilities and solutions in data analytics, artificial intelligence, and personalized implants, would enhance Medtronic’s fully-integrated procedural solution for surgical planning and delivery. This marks another important step in furthering our commitment to improving outcomes in spine care,” said Jacob Paul, senior vice president and president of the Cranial and Spinal Technologies division, which is part of the Restorative Therapies Group at Medtronic, headquartered in Ireland. “Medtronic will become the first company to be able to offer an integrated solution including artificial intelligence-driven surgical planning, personalized spinal implants and robotic-assisted surgical delivery, which will significantly benefit our customers and their patients.”

Following news of the deal, Medicrea shares jumped by 20% in regular trading, most likely due to the premium the acquiring company was set to pay on the target’s share price, in this case, 22 percent over the closing price of Medicrea shares on 14 July 2020.

Medicrea’s UNiD technology (Image courtesy of Medicrea)

The deal will allow Medtronic to incorporate Medicrea’s latest innovations, which include the UNiD ASI (Adaptive Spine Intelligence) technology, designed to support surgeon workflow in pre-operative planning and incorporating 3D printing processes to create personalized implant solutions for surgery. The company’s portfolio also consists of artificial intelligence-driven surgical planning using predictive modeling and sophisticated algorithms that measure and digitally reconstruct the spine to its optimal profile. As well as an ultra-modern manufacturing facility in Lyon, France housing the development and production of 3D printed titanium patient-specific implants.

“Spine surgery is one of the more complex procedures in healthcare because of the high number of different parameters to take into consideration. It is impossible for the human brain to compute all of them for one single patient,” said Denys Sournac, founder, chairman and CEO of Medicrea. “The medical world has been waiting for the arrival of customization in spinal surgery. With scientific progress in understanding sagittal balance and spinal injury, combined with the advent of new digital technologies, it is now possible to offer spinal patients entirely customized implants. We are thrilled to be joining forces with Medtronic because we share a similar mission to restore the long-term quality of life for patients. Now, together, we can help more patients in more places benefit from consistently high-quality surgical care.”

3D-printed spinal implants from Medicrea (Image courtesy of Medicrea)

The news comes amid expectations of an eventual recovery from the coronavirus pandemic and as Medtronic’s stock bounces back from a significant fall in the early months after COVID-19 emerged. The overall decline in procedures and supply chain disruptions have been among the key causes of concern for Medtronic, as well as impacted sales generated from China.

Medtronic said in a statement that the completion of the deal was subject to Medtronic getting at least 66.67% of Medicrea’s share capital. Up until now, Medtronic has entered into agreements with Medicrea shareholders totaling 44.4% of the company’s current outstanding share capital. The tender offer is expected to be filed with the French Markets Authority (AMF) in September 2020 and will be opened once the foreign investment approval in France and the merger control clearance in the United States are finalized.

Over the last seven decades, Medtronic has introduced a wide range of products to treat up to 70 health conditions, from cardiac devices and surgical tools to cranial and spine robotics, even insulin pumps, and patient monitoring systems. In the last few years, teams of scientists and engineers at the company have been working on new possibilities for personalized medicine using 3D printing technology, like its titanium 3D printing platform for spinal surgery implants. At the company’s facility, seven 3D printers work around the clock filling orders for rapid prototyping and medical models that allow doctors to practice procedures on life-like simulations. Additionally, researchers from Medtronic teamed up with academia to create a new operating room system powered by personalized 3D images, to give neurosurgeons better tools to remove brain tumors.

Medtronic headquarters in Dublin, Ireland (Image courtesy of Medtronic)

As of 2017, Medtronic was the leader in the U.S. market for spinal implants with a share of over one third. Once the acquisition is complete, the company will be able to expand and strengthen its position as a global innovator in further enabling technologies and solutions for spine surgery.

Spinal procedures are considered by experts as one of the most painful in neurosurgery and orthopedics, with over 1.62 million instrumented interventions performed every year. ResearchMoz analysts predicted the global spine surgery products market to hit $16.7 billion by 2025, mainly due to an increase in spine disorder cases among the geriatric population. The demand for innovative, minimally invasive solutions to this problem is critical for patient healthcare, which is why Medtronic is looking towards the predictive medicine opportunity that Medicrea has been developing, by collecting an unprecedented amount of data to develop its proprietary predictive models and employing disruptive technologies in every step of the way. Overall, the combination of the companies’ technical know-how would probably improve the clinical experience for patients and strengthen the future of spinal health.

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UNICAEN: New Bioprinted Tumor Models Help Researchers in France Study Its Biology

Studying cancer biology is among the top priorities for researchers around the world. From consortiums to universities, pharma companies, newcomers in the drug development industry, and research institutions, current research to understand how tumors develop is crucial to progress against the disease. At the University of Caen Normandie (UNICAEN), in France, two teams of more than 30 researchers, clinicians, and doctoral students are developing a new 3D bioprinted tumor model that will provide a novel alternative tool for studying tumor biology and response to anti-cancer treatments.

Many of them are part of CERVOxy, one of the scientific teams of the Imaging and Therapeutic Strategies of Cerebral and Tumoral Pathologies (ISTCT) unit, which was created in early 2012 by the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Commission for Atomic Energy and Alternative Energies (CEA) and the UNICAEN, and hosted at the GIP CYCERON imaging platform in Caen, France. CERVOxy’s scientific team focuses on hypoxia and its role in glioblastoma (a fast-growing brain tumor) and brain metastases.

All of these topics are developed in different axes to study tumorigenic or tumor-forming processes, to develop new therapeutic strategies. For example, they are researching how to use hadrontherapy (protons and carbon ions) to treat brain tumors. Moreover, the effects of these therapies on healthy brain tissue are also being evaluated using in vitro and in vivo methods, which is why they have started to develop new models based on bioprinting technology.

3DPrint.com spoke to Nolwenn Pasquet, a post-doctoral fellow from the University of Caen and one of the researchers at CERVOxy focused on studying the effects of radiotherapy and hadrontherapy on the brain healthy tissue in the context of a glioblastoma. Along with her colleagues, Pasquet is using Cellink’s INKREDIBLE+ to perform a great deal of the work.

“Despite recent improvements, treatment of glioblastoma is still challenging and the physiopathology of these tumors is so complex that the use of 2D in vitro models fails to recapitulate the in vivo situation,” indicated Pasquet. “Moreover, there is a lack of relevant models to mimic interactions between the cells, for example, it is not possible for the 2D models to reflect the tumor microenvironment such as the hypoxic gradient and the presence of surrounding cerebral and inflammatory cells. In this context, new 3D brain models obtained by bioprinting are very attractive for glioblastoma studies.”

For this study, Pasquet and fellow researchers used a murine glioblastoma cell line to develop a novel 3D bioprinted glioblastoma model. These cells were then embedded into specific bioinks from Cellink to mimic the extracellular matrix, and followed by bioprinting of the models, which was performed by the INKREDIBLE+ bioprinter, provided to CERVOxy by the LARIA team, part of the François Jacob Institute of Biology, and a collaborator in the development of the model.

According to Pasquet, in further experiments, it will be possible to observe the crosstalk between glioblastoma cells and surrounding cells (astrocytes, inflammatory cells, and more) by combining these cells in the same 3D model and analyzing cell progression, invasiveness, and interactions between them.

“In terms of preliminary results, we observed after bioprinting that glioblastoma cells have a homogeneous distribution until six days and then start to form cell clusters at the periphery of the model at 14 days of cell culture,” explained Pasquet. “Interestingly, these models recapitulate one of the most important features of glioblastomas: hypoxia. Indeed, 14 days after biobrinting we observed a hypoxic gradient in our model with hypoxic cells in the core of the model not observed in the periphery or at six days.”

Pasquet indicated that they also performed x-ray irradiation on these models. X-ray radiotherapy as a complement to surgery and chemotherapy is part of the standard protocol for the treatment of brain tumors. As in medical radiography, it involves delivering photons in different doses, except in this case it is to destroy cancer cells. Through these 3D bioprinted models, the researchers wished to evaluate the response and sensitivity of the cells to irradiation and thanks to specific markers, they were able to evaluate the proliferation of the cells which gives them indications on the evolution of the tumor in its environment.

Researcher at the CERVOxy lab (Image: CERVOxy)

“For now, we are starting with this new methodology and it is necessary to further characterize the model well and to know its limitations in order to reach a conclusion on the results obtained. For example, it is difficult to rule out the fact that cells interact with each other in this model and real-time microscopy experiments would allow us to verify it. This is an important point and is part of the reason why we decided to develop this type of model in order to recreate the microenvironment that these cells have within the patient’s brain tissue. These results are positive and encourage us to continue our research in this direction.”

The project is led by the laboratory, which is a French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) unit –a public-funded institution that covers all scientific disciplines. It is financed by several sponsors, notably the ARCHADE center for hadrontherapy in Caen; HABIONOR European project, co-funded by the Normandy County Council, the French State in the framework of the interregional development Contract “Vallée de la Seine”, and Région Normandie for the Normandy Network for Therapeutic Innovation in Oncology (ONCOTHERA) project.

Pasquet suggested that without bioprinting technology, the information obtained would not have been the same. She explained that “this technology is in full development,” and that “we’ve only been using it for a short period of time, just over a year, and there’s an important characterization step depending on what you want to study before you can do tests.”

The expert concluded that she “believes that there is a relevant distinction to be made about the models used in bioprinting, and many are going to be used to reproduce a fully functional organ in the fields of medicine and tissue engineering. The interest in 3D bioprinting is to create complex cellular structures through a process of superimposition of successive layers, and it is this aspect that is of particular interest to us in order to have a new and more complex study model for our research.”

The CERVOxy research team (Image: CERVOxy)

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CELLINK in France: Expanding Their Portfolio in 2020

Seeking to strengthen their presence in Europe, 3D bioprinter provider and pioneer bioink company CELLINK, opened their new offices in Lyon, France, last October. Begining new partnerships and collaborations with universities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and more, is a big part of the core mission of CELLINK, as they combine their technology with research innovation everywhere. The city of Lyon offers a booming scene for bioprinting, with companies heavily focusing on microtumors and taking advantage of an established network that has collected more than 2000 tumors from patients in collaboration with 11 major cancer hospitals in the country via the IMODI initiative–a French consortium to develop new experimental models of cancer–which preserves and archives all tissue and cell samples developed by the consortium partners during the project.

3DPrint.com spoke to CELLINK’s Sales Director for France and Southern Europe, Edouard Zorn, who envisions a greater expansion this year, new partnerships and research collaborations: “We hope to really expand our portfolio this year in France.”

“Cellink is amazing at building bridges between a product and researchers from different backgrounds and cultures. The company has a team-oriented mindset, looking to work with people from different nationalities,” sad Zorn, a biotechnology engineer with vast experience in scientific sales management.

Zorn and his five-people work team at the Lyon offices have their agenda full, with 30 customers in France, bioprinter installations, and training sessions for new CELLINK users, Zorn can’t help but highlight how fast the field of bioprinting is moving in Europe. “There are many researchers focusing on skin and cancer, that’s really big here, but lately I have also been in contact with companies working on biopharma, vaccines and some even trying to replace animal testing assays,” he stated. 

Since January 2018, CELLINK has been working with another major player in Lyon, CTI Biotech, using bioprinting to develop microtumors. CTI Biotech uses CELLINK technology exclusively for their work and now have three bioprinters at their lab, which is also located in Lyon. CELLINK and CTI Biotech had even signed a deal to 3D print customized cancer cells, with CELLINK assisting CTI in the production of patient-specific cancer tumor replicas, which will be 3D printed by combining CTI’s bioink with a sample of patients’ own cancer cells, promising to deliver personalized treatments for cancer on a custom, patient-by-patient basis.

“The aim of our collaboration is to give researchers an advantage in treating specific cancer types, and in the long term, take a serious step forward in the fight to cure cancer. CTI is moving really fast to develop models and commercialize them, and they choose our machines for their versatility, intuitiveness, and easily modifiable parameters. CTI Biotech is one of the customers we most grow with, and I believe it was a very good decision for both companies to work together,” explained Zorn. 

So far, they have already commercialized CELLINK skin for drug and cosmetic testing, which they have also been working to improve, and Zorn thinks that soon they will be working on introducing some human cells to the skin, as well as perhaps vascularizing the tissue.

Edouard Zorn (far right) and CELLINK bioprinters at the CTI Biotech labs (Credit: CELLINK)

The CELLINK office in Lyon is selling their machines to central Europe, working along the french-speaking part of Switzerland and Belgium, as well as in Spanish and Portuguese markets. 

Edouard Zorn at CELLINK France (Credit: CELLINK)

“We work with a lot of universities in France. For example, at the Medicine University of Montpellier, Xavier Garric, uses the INKREDIBLE+ bioprinter to teach master students how to design and print implantable medical devices and scaffolds for tissue engineering; and Alexandra Fuchs from the Hôpital St Louis employs a BIO X for tissue engineering.”

At the University of Grenoble, Vincent Haguet is generating skin, cornea and pancreas organoids for the modeling of organogenesis (organ formation) and pathogenesis (disease development), with a BIO X. Among these applications, organoids are used to screen and test new drugs. Also wielding the power of the BIO X is Anthony Treizèbre, from the University of Lille, for the bioprinting of Tumor-On-Chip and Blood-Vessels-on-Chip for the development of multicellular microfluidic biomimicry-based devices for the study of metastasis. Their idea is to reproduce blood vessels using human umbilical vein endothelial cells (HUVEC) and modulating the surrounding extracellular matrix.

The University of Nantes‘ Pierre Weiss also works with BIO X to print calcium phosphate-based personalized medical devices for maxillo-facial bone regeneration, as well as enzyme-based hydrogel formulation for the complex systems in bone regeneration.

Zorn believes that “there is a big demand from patients that expect the medical and bioengineering field to adapt treatments to patients. There is a lot of expectation for personalized medicine, especially with regard to microtumors for drug testing. Moreover, lately, we have seen researchers focusing heavily on immunotherapy, so I see a great future in that regard and consider that CTI Biotech is trying to position itself in that field.”

Fortunately, he suggests that there is collaboration in Europe. The European Union (EU) is financing joint collaboration projects with the objective to develop medical devices and applications with therapeutic solutions, and CELLINK wants to be a part of that.  Zorn emphasized the importance of the Silk Fusion Project, which unites scientists in the development of a technology that uses silk, a natural biocompatible and sustainable material, to produce a bioink and 3D print platelet production instrumentation, attempting to solve the limited supply of human platelets. Other projects which have CELLINK as a collaborator seek to solve problems for joint articulation, bone, and even bioprinting parts of the tendon and cartilage.

“We need people who understand cell biology, chemistry, hardware, electronics, and software, as well as a good comprehension and understanding the needs inherent to each country’s culture, that is the way in which we expand,” concluded Zorn.

Edouard Zorn at the new CELLINK offices in France (Credit: CELLINK)

The French branch of the company joins the other six worldwide offices of CELLINK, in Boston, Gothenburg, Freiburg, Blacksburg, Kyoto, and Stuttgart. Zorn hopes that the sales force along with the experienced network of professionals around the world working for CELLINK will result in a stronger presence of the company in central Europe as well as more joint efforts that could bring the future of bioprinting technology closer to our present.

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Poietis: Bioprinting With Their Innovative Laser-Assisted Technology

In 2014, French startup Poietis developed a unique technology for the bioprinting of living tissue. Unlike conventional approaches to tissue engineering or extrusion bioprinting, their promising 4D laser-assisted system allows cells to be positioned in three dimensions with micrometric resolution and precision. Their aim is to design living tissue using cells and biomaterial that researchers can apply to manufacture products for regenerative medicine, preclinical research, and cosmetic uses–making a big difference in the testing of cosmetics and consumer products. This is especially relevant considering that the debate about animal research and testing is a hot topic everywhere.

In 2013, the European Union passed legislation that instituted a ban on the sale of animal-tested products in the continent, followed by other countries like India, Israel, Norway, Taiwan, and New Zealand, while the practice is being contested in the US and other markets where it is still legal. Companies like Poietis are using 3D bioprinting technology to develop a more cost-effective, versatile, and ethical way for companies to go about testing. But that’s just one of their advantages, along with the development of the multimodal bioprinting platform Next Generation Bioprinting (NGB); the creation of Poieskin, commercial bioprinted human tissue; and the NGB-C system for clinical applications.

Researcher at work at Poietis labs

In 2012 and after 20 years of professional experience in the biotech MedTech sector, the co-founder of Poietis, Bruno Brisson, met Fabien Guillemot (the other co-founder of the company and CEO).

“Guillemot was questioning himself about the valorization of a technology he had developed with his team at INSERM and the Tissue Bioengineering Lab of the University of Bordeaux: laser-assisted bioprinting, and I had created a consulting firm focused on business development in life sciences, so it was the right time to get together and share our vision of what could be done with this technology and what we wanted to do in the future,” revealed Brisson in an interview with 3DPrint.com. “We wanted to set-up an innovative company that could take the technology to clinics, provide new therapeutic solutions to the market of tissue and organ repairs, and help develop new advanced therapies.”

Bruno Brisson, Co-Founder of Poietis

Regulatory pressure everywhere to ban animal testing and concerns about animal experiments to model human health, along with the animal experiment ban for the cosmetics industry in Europe, has resulted in an evergrowing demand for in vitro alternatives. This is one of the reasons why Poeitis founders decided to first focus on in vitro applications for the skin tissue market. To do so, they hired an interdisciplinary team of physicists, software developers, biologists, and pharmacists to bring their expertise to the areas of laser and optics, microfluidics, machine learning, cell biology, and tissue engineering as well as cell therapy manufacturing. Their bioprinted in vitro models are used in dermo-cosmetics, but also in pharmaceutical research, for example, to evaluate the mechanism of actions for validating new drug candidates in the case of disease models.

The company, headquartered in Pessac, France, soon developed partnerships with other firms. In 2015, chemical giant BASF signed an agreement with Poietis to 3D print skin for cosmetic testing purposes, using the 3D laser-assisted bioprinting technology to further develop its Mimeskin tissue, which is one of the closest equivalents to the original physiological equivalents of real human skin. After their success, they moved towards improving the skin models by increasing structure complexity and adding new cell types. Almost around the same time, Poietis became associated with the L’Oréal group and began researching how to bioprint hair as a viable solution for people suffering from alopecia.

“Poietis has been able to enter into industrial partnerships quickly after inception, like with pharma company Servier to develop a 4D bioprinted liver model that could predict liver toxicity of drugs better than current methods,” Brisson said. “As well as other collaborations with the academic sector, such as with the Catholic University of Leuven (KU Leuven), in Belgium, on cartilage. As well as through two European Consortium EU H2020 FET-Open Pan3DP projects, one to biomimic developmental processes to fabricate 3D bioprinted pancreatic tissue units that allow sustained cell viability, expansion and functional differentiation ex vivo and another in neurobiology.”

A 16 layer 3D structure designed with Poietis CAD software and created with the NGB-R’s extrusion process

At Poietis, the core of their expertise is the high-resolution laser-assisted bioprinting, after which they have based and developed their Next-Generation Bioprinting (NGB) platform, which they claim gives tissue engineers and researchers greater freedom in the choice of biomaterials and hydrogels, and greater versatility in their research and development. The two bioprinters currently marketed are the NGB-R Bioprinter (commercialized for research applications) and the NGB-C Bioprinter (a clinical-grade, GMP-compliant system dedicated to clinical applications and challenges of industrial manufacturing of implantable tissues).

“Today our NGB-R consists of a platform (CAD + bioprinter) allowing to control the 3D organization of cells with cell resolution. It is an automated, robotized bio-printing platform guaranteeing reproducible tissue manufacturing and accelerating translation to clinical phases. Moreover, it is a single multimodal platform embedding the three main bioprinting technologies–including laser-assisted bioprinting– and allowing researchers to work with a variety of cell types but also to assess the printability and biocompatibility and work with a number of bioinks. Finally, we can control and monitor the formation of organoids through a controlled deposition of 2D cells (one or more cell types) and bioprint large objects such as cell aggregate of spheroids,” said Brisson.

At Poietis, they talk about the process as a form of 4D printing, claiming that “the approach consists in programming self-organized tissue (cells and extracellular matrix) that evolve in a controlled way until specific biological functions emerge”. So that by analyzing tissue evolution during maturation, they are able to optimize the initial tissue architecture defined by a CAD tool in order to improve the functionality of the printed tissues and guarantee that they are manufactured in the most reliable way. The company is developing dedicated software to program tissue self-organization, which means that they will anticipate the evolution of the bioprinted construct with time. And time plays a big role in 4D bioprinting, something which makes their system quite unique.

We have talked about 4D printing before, which means creating 3D objects that change their shape over time in response to stimuli such as heat, moisture or light, making structures that easily adapt to their environment. On the hardware side, Poietis applies its laser-assisted bioprinting technique using laser pulses programmed to be sent every nanosecond, used to deposit microscopic droplets of cell-laden ink on a cartridge (composed of an ink film spread on a glass plate). Via the software, they can control the physical conditions of the ejection (like energy and viscosity), as well as the droplet volume to near picolitre accuracy. According to the company, the process can achieve 20 µm resolution at speeds of 10,000 droplets a second, resulting in cell concentrations of 100 million cells/mL and 100 percent cell viability.

The process led Poietis to develop Poieskin, a bioprinted skin made up of a human full-thickness skin model that is entirely produced by 3D bioprinting.

“Poieskin® consists of a dermal compartment composed of primary human fibroblasts embedded in a collagen I matrix overlaid by a stratified epidermis derived from primary human keratinocytes. Its biofabrication benefits from the latest advances in 3D bioprinting technology. The high precision and resolution of Poietis laser-assisted bioprinter, as well as the embedded in-line monitoring systems, able to control the quality of each bioprinted layer and hence to manufacture controlled 3D cell structures and reproducible tissue models. It can be used for pharmacological and cosmetic research (like testing the effects of a drug on a real human skin equivalent), so at the moment, we are mainly selling the innovation to CROs (Contract Research Organisations), academic laboratories and dermo-cosmetic firms.”

With a tissue engineering market worth an estimated 15 billion dollars, and growing, the bioprinting industry is getting a lot of attention, and companies all over the world are taking notice. Poietis has three patents covering its bioprinting technology, and a recent financing round of five million euros to accelerate technological developments that could lead to the first implantation of a bioprinted tissue into patients starting in 2021, and is well is on its way to becoming one of the innovative European startups to look for during the coming years.

Brisson explained that “the future of tissue engineering will be based on technologies capable of studying the growth of connective tissue or organs but also to produce replacement tissue for implantation into the body. We consider that tissue engineering will be the next revolution in healthcare, using the patient’s own cells to build or rebuild organs.”

At the lab with Poietis

“Poietis is still working a lot on skin bioprinting, especially for in vitro applications based on Poieskin® as a platform of complexification. But the company is also developing the NGB-C system to meet future clinical needs of our partners, which is based on the same core technology as NGB-R, but NGB-C will face the requirements of translational research and the challenges associated with the industrial manufacturing of implantable tissues. Right now we are at a turning point as we started different projects with clinical aims, the first and most advanced is on the skin by targeting certain wound indications with a goal of a first-in-man within two years (clinical trials). We also have two other projects in cardiology and for all of these, we already have clinical collaborators.”

NGB-C System

The bioprinting technology available at Poietis is the result of innovative research, and over a ten-year time lapse at Inserm and the University of Bordeaux, resulting in wins at the iLab competition in 2014, the World Innovation Challenge Phase II in 2017, and most recently the EY Disruptive Strategy Award. But Poietis is lucky to be among a forward-looking bioprinting environment. The groundbreaking technology has seen some challenges over the last few years, and not every country has made efforts to help with its development.

According to Brisson, “France is certainly helping the emergence of these technologies with agencies such as BpiFrance, the French Public Investment Bank and a one-stop-shop for entrepreneurs and different subsidies for innovation at regional and national levels. That being said initiatives at the European level will certainly have a bigger impact, such as Restore–a very large action for advanced therapies at the EU level–, as well as the support of the European Medicines Agency.”

In many ways, Poietis has begun to change the future of regenerative medicine and the manufacture of living tissue. With uses in cosmetics and drug testing that are quickly becoming an alternative to animal testing everywhere, the company is fast to becoming a household name in France, pushing the advances of their innovation into clinical labs and giving researchers more tools to efficiently surpass the limits of bioprinting. We’ll have to wait until 2021 before the first implantation of bioprinted tissue into patients become a reality.

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Sciaky Joins R&D Initiative to Combine Traditional Metallurgy with Wirefed Metal 3D Printing Techniques

Metal 3D printing solutions provider Sciaky, Inc., well known for its extremely popular Electron Beam Additive Manufacturing (EBAM) process, just announced that it has entered into a research and development initiative with metallurgist expert Aubert & Duval – a subsidiary of the Eramet group’s Alloys division – and Airbus, one of its previous 3D printing partners. The ambitious initiative, also called the Metallic Advanced Materials for Aeronautics (MAMA) project, is being driven by the Saint Exupéry Institute for Research in Technology (IRT), and the academic partner for the project is the Production Engineering laboratory of the National School of Engineering in Tarbes, France.

“Sciaky is proud to work with the Saint Exupéry IRT, Aubert & Duval and Airbus on this exciting project. Industrial metal additive manufacturing technology continues to break new ground every day, and Sciaky is committed to keeping EBAM at the forefront of this movement,” said Scott Phillips, the President and CEO of Sciaky, Inc., a subsidiary of Phillips Service Industries, Inc. (PSI).

In terms of work envelope, Sciaky’s exclusive EBAM technology is probably the most widely scalable metal AM solution in the industry. It’s the only industrial metal 3D printing process that has approved applications for air, land, sea, and space, with gross deposition rates up to 11.34 kg of metal an hour, and is able to manufacture parts from 203 mm to 5.79 meters in length. Rather than just melting the outer layer of the metal powder, the EBAM process completely liquefies the metal wire feed.

The fast, cost-effective EBAM process offers a wide range of material options, including titanium, for large-scale metal applications, and uses its adaptive IRISS (Interlayer Real-time Imaging and Sensing System) to combine quality and control, as the patented system can sense, and digitally self-adjust, metal deposition with repeatability and precision. It is mainly due to the IRISS system that the Chicago-based company’s EBAM 3D printing process is so good at delivering, as the company puts it, “consistent part geometry, mechanical properties, microstructure, and metal chemistry, from the first part to the last.”

The goal of its combined MAMA project with Airbus and Aubert & Duval is to combine traditional metallurgy (high-power closed die forging) with new wirefed metal 3D printing techniques, such as Sciaky’s EBAM process, in order to come up with new processes for manufacturing titanium alloys that can be used to make aircraft parts. Based on the caliber of its partners, Sciaky made a good decision in joining the R&D initiative – Airbus is a 3D printing pioneer in the aerospace industry, and Aubert & Duval creates and develops advanced metallurgical solutions for projects in demanding industries, such as nuclear, medical, energy, defense, and aeronautics.

The project’s first phase has global funding in the amount of €4.2 million. 50% of this funding is supported by the French State as part of its “Investing in the Future” program (Programme Investissement d’Avenir, or PIA), while the other half is funded by industrial partners of the initiative.

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[Images provided by Sciaky, Inc.]

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French Researchers Develop Algorithm to Generate Interior Ribbed Support Vaults for 3D Printed Hollow Objects

Hollowed Bunny printed with our method, using only 2.2% of material inside (compared to a filled model). The supports use 316 mm of filament over a total of 1,622 mm for the print).

In 3D printing, every layer of material must be supported by the layer below it in order to form a solid object; when it comes to FFF 3D printing, material can only be deposited at points that are already receiving support from below. French researchers Thibault Tricard, Frédéric Claux, and Sylvain Lefebvre, from the Université de Limoges (UNILIM) and the Université de Lorraine, wanted to look at 3D printing hollow objects, and proposed a new method for hollowing in their paper “Ribbed support vaults for 3D printing of hollowed objects.”

The abstract reads, “To reduce print time and material usage, especially in the context of prototyping, it is often desirable to fabricate hollow objects. This exacerbates the requirement of support between consecutive layers: standard hollowing produces surfaces in overhang that cannot be directly fabricated anymore. Therefore, these surfaces require internal support structures. These are similar to external supports for overhangs, with the key difference that internal supports remain invisible within the object after fabrication. A fundamental challenge is to generate structures that provide a dense support while using little material. In this paper, we propose a novel type of support inspired by rib structures. Our approach guarantees that any point in a layer is supported by a point below, within a given threshold distance. Despite providing strong guarantees for printability, our supports remain lightweight and reliable to print. We propose a greedy support generation algorithm that creates compact hierarchies of rib-like walls. The walls are progressively eroded away and straightened, eventually merging with the interior object walls.”

Figure 2: A Stanford bunny model is hollowed using a standard offsetting approach. The resulting cavity (R) will not print properly due to local minima (red) and overhanging areas (orange).

While most people think of 3D printing supports as external ones that support overhanging parts of an object, the interior of an object may also need support structures.

“Hollowing a part is not trivial with technologies such as FFF,” the researchers explained. “In particular, the inner cavity resulting from a standard hollowing operator will not be printable: it will contain regions in overhang (with a low slope, see Figure 2) as well as local minima: pointed features facing downwards. There is therefore a need for support structures that can operate inside a part.”

Inner supports should occupy a small amount of space with the print cavity, and the impact on overall print time should be slight. Other researchers have contributed a variety of ideas in terms of support structures with 3D printed hollowed objects, including:

  • sparse infills
  • self-supported cavities
  • external supports as internal structures

“We propose an algorithm to generate internal support structures that guarantee that deposited material is supported everywhere from below, are reliable to print, and require little extra material,” the researchers wrote. “This is achieved by generating hierarchical rib-like wall structures, that quickly erode away into the internal walls of the object.

“Our algorithm produces structures offering a very high support density, while using little extra material. In addition, our supports print reliably as they are composed of continuous, wall-like structures that suffer less from stability issues.”

Hollow kitten model printed with our method and split
in half vertically.

The researchers explained how to support a 3D object by “sweeping through its slices from top to bottom” and searching for any unsupported parts, then adding necessary material below them in the next slice; this material doesn’t need to cover the entire unsupported area, and can take any shape.

“The amount of material added can also be larger than the area needing support. Depositing more material than necessary comes at the price of longer printing times, but can be interesting to significantly improve printability,” the researchers explained. “Large, simple support structures often are faster to print than complex, smaller structures. Indeed, when multiple disconnected locations need to be supported, it is in many cases more effective to print a single, large structure. It encompasses and conservatively supports many small locations. This is more effective than supporting isolated spots, which individual support size may be very small and therefore difficult to print, and which will inevitably increase the amount of travel and therefore print time (taking nozzle acceleration and deceleration into account).”

The team then explained their algorithm for ribbed support vault structures. The idea is to use three main operations to produce supports: propagating and reducing supports from the above slice, detecting areas that appear to be unsupported in the current slice, and adding the supports needed for it.

“Our inspiration comes from architecture, where supports are generally designed in an arch (and vault) like manner. In particular, vaults tend to join walls in any interior space, with only a few straight pillars directed towards the floor. Similarly, many vault structures present hierarchical aspects. Such hierarchies afford for dense supports while quickly reducing to only a few elements – much like trees,” they wrote.

“Within each slice we favor supports having a rectilinear aspect: they provide support all around them while eroding quickly from their ends. Thus, within a given slice, we seek to produce rectilinear features covering the areas to be supported.

“We propose to rely on 2D trees joining the object inner boundaries. Through the propagation-reduction operator, the trees are quickly eroded away (from their branches). Taken together across slices, the trees produce self-supported walls that soon join and merge with the object inner contours, much like the ribs of ribbed vaults.”

The team 3D printed a variety of PLA models with the same perimeters on different systems. Orange models were fabricated on an Ultimaker 3, while the yellow Moai was printed on an Ultimaker 2 and the octopus on a CR-10. A Prima P120 was used to make white models, the blue Buddha was printed on an eMotion Tech MicroDelta Rework, and a dual-color fawn was made on a Flashforge Creator Pro.

Demon dog printed using our method for external support.

The quality of these prints matches models with a dense infill, thanks to the full support property offered, and the algorithm generates multiple small segments that require individual printing, which led to many “retract/prime operations surrounding travels.”

“Depending on the printer model used, the quality of the extrusion mechanics, the user-adjustable pressure of the dented extrusion wheel on the filament, as well as the brand of the filament itself, a small amount of under-extrusion may happen,” the team explained.

“To compensate for this, we perform a 5% prime surplus at the beginning of each support segment: if the filament was retracted by 3 mm before travel, we push it back by 3.15 mm after travel. Because the extra prime may create a bulge, we avoid doing it when located too close to perimeters, so as to not impact surface quality.”

The team also evaluated how much material their method needed, and compared this with materials used for iterative carving and support-free hollowing methods. They also noted how layer thickness impacted support size, and recorded processing times.

Comparison with Support-Free Hollowing and Iterative Carving. The input volume represents the volume (in mm3) and height (in mm) of the model.

“While producing supports of small length, our algorithm is clearly not optimal. This is revealed for instance on low-angle overhangs,” the team wrote. “The inefficiency is due to the local choice of connecting support walls to the closest internal surface, ignoring the material quantity that will have to appear in slices below. While a more global scheme could be devised, it could quickly become prohibitively expensive to compute.”

The researchers concluded that their algorithm ensures complete support of deposited material, which can be helpful for extruding viscous or heavy materials like concrete and clay. They believe that their method for 3D printing hollowed objects through generating ribbed internal support structures could one day lead to novel external support structures as well.

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The Notre-Dame fire’s ashes could be used to 3D-print its new gargoyles

Via FastCompany

When Notre-Dame was partially destroyed during a fire this month, the world mourned not just the loss of the building, but the ornate stone details that didn’t survive. Architecture firms are already racing to propose plans to rebuild the cathedral’s roof, but one company is proposing a plan to resuscitate its fallen gargoyles and chimeras–by transforming the rubble and ashes into material that can be 3D-printed into exact replicas.

Learn more

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Two French Companies Collaborate to Make the Country’s First 3D Printed Mechanical Metal Watch

While there are those who have used 3D printing to make their own watch cases, watch bands, and watch chargers, others have taken the next step and actually made 3D printed watches, from kid-friendly to sophisticated, wooden to gold and plastic, and even timepieces that can tell you if you’ve had a little too much to drink. For years, I rocked the same black, Velcro, digital sports wristwatch every single day. Looking back at old photos, it was definitely functional, but not at all attractive. My friends joked that they would have to pry it off my wrist on my wedding day…which they did not, I might add. I decided on my own that a watch with a Velcro band and light-up screen didn’t really say ‘elegant winter wedding.’

But a new 3D printed watch that’s the result of a collaboration between French special metals distributor STAINLESS and watchmaking company UTINAM Besançon might be the perfect accessory for a fancy event.

“…we worked in 2018 with a well-known French watchmaker, Mr Philippe LEBRU (who built giant clocks in France, Switzerland and Japan) to build the first watch developed for metallic additive manufacturing,” Jean-Baptiste Sepulchre, the Marketing and Communication Officer for STAINLESS, told 3DPrint.com. “This project is our way to celebrate our 90th birthday, STAINLESS having been created in 1928.”

[Image: STAINLESS]

The timepiece, conceived of and assembled at French watchmaking capital Besançon, is said to be the first automatic, mechanical 3D printed watch made in France. The two project partners are both well-known for their technical expertise and reliability: UTINAM Besançon was founded by monumental clock and original watch creator Lebru, as mentioned above, and STAINLESS distributes special metals to demanding industries, like aerospace and medical.

[Image: L’Est Républicain/Ludovic Laude]

The two companies were committed to having as many of the watch components as possible manufactured within the boundaries of Franche-Comté, a traditional province in eastern France; one of the only exceptions was the Japanese timing mechanism. A 100-year-old factory in Morteau made the watch hands, and a craftsman from Besançon created the hand-sewn, genuine leather bracelet.

The watch case was entirely 3D printed, using laser melting technology, out of stainless steel 316L powder on a Renishaw AM250. Apprentices from the Besançon training center at the UIMM “Creativ Lab” 3D printed the case.

The project came about from a STAINLESS initiative to showcase its values in honor of its 90 years in business. To do so, STAINLESS wanted to complete a project that was regional, innovative, and historic, and reached out to Lebru with a proposition to combine their separate expertise on a collaborative piece.

The collaboration itself can be considered something of an innovation, given that both participants focus on very different end products: Lebru and UTINAM Besançon designs and manufactures original watches and clocks, while STAINLESS supplies raw metal materials, including metallic powder for 3D printing.

Joëlle Verdier, STAINLESS president, and Philippe Lebru, UTINAM Besançon watchmaker [Image: STAINLESS]

But because both of the companies were open-minded, they were able to get past the typical relationship between customers and suppliers and transcend to one based on, as STAINLESS put it in a press release, “mutual confidence and trust,” which resulted in a lovely, 3D printed metal watch.

At last month’s MICRONORA Exhibition in Besançon, STAINLESS displayed the 3D printed watch at its stand. Starting at the end of the year, it will be on sale at the UTINAM Besancon boutique, which is opposite the Musée du Temps.

Discuss this project and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com or share your thoughts in the comments below. 

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3D Printing News Briefs: July 10, 2018

We’re starting things off with a little business in today’s 3D Printing News Briefs, then moving on to news from the medical and construction industries, and finishing up with a few fun stories to make you smile. First up, Jeff Immelt, the former CEO of General Electric, has joined the board at Desktop Metal, and an industrial 3D printer distributor is offering a new cleaning unit by Omegasonics to its customers. Moving on, Insight Medical and Onkos Surgical are exploring the use of augmented reality in musculoskeletal oncology together, while Australian researchers introduced a new model for large-scale 3D facial recognition and a family has officially moved into the Nantes 3D printed house. Finally, a vegan confection startup is selling its popsicles, made with 3D printed molds, at select Starbucks locations in Los Angeles, and an EnvisionTEC 3D printer is being used to create characters for a stop motion series about superheroes.

Desktop Metal Board Welcomes Jeff Immelt

Jeffrey Immelt

Leading metal 3D printing company Desktop Metal, located near Boston, was founded three years ago with the goal of making metal 3D printing an essential tool for engineers and manufacturers. The company announced today that it has elected a new member to its Board of Directors – Jeffrey Immelt, the Chairman and CEO of GE until he retired from the company last year after 16 years. Immelt, who began his tenure only days before 9/11 and skillfully led GE through the crisis, has decades of experience, and is regarded as one of the most accomplished, innovative business technology leaders in the world. This makes him a valuable asset as Desktop Metal continues to grow.

“I am excited and honored to join the Desktop Metal board and work with this exceptional team of visionary entrepreneurs. Since it was founded nearly three years ago, Desktop Metal has become a trailblazer across the additive manufacturing landscape and I have a tremendous respect for the company’s ability to innovate,” said Immelt. “I look forward to sharing my experiences and contributing to the future direction and growth of this emerging metal 3D printing pioneer.”

Dr. Ken Washington, CTO and Vice President of Research and Advanced Engineering at the Ford Motor Company, was also recently appointed to the Desktop Metal board.

Industrial 3D Printer Distributor Offering Customers New Omegasonics Cleaning Unit

815BTX

Plural Additive Manufacturing, which is the exclusive North American distributor for industrial 3D printers by 3ntr, is offering the new 815BTX cleaning unit from ultrasonic cleaning systems leader Omegasonics to customers who purchase its 3D printers. The versatile and cost-effective unit is the 3D printing market’s first dual tank/dual action bench top ultrasonic cleaning machine, and can help easily remove water soluble support material.

The left tank of the 815BTX uses a biodegradable cleaning detergent developed by Plural, called BioSolv, while the right tank uses hot water; the model’s dual action then ensures the safe and efficient cleaning of 3D printed parts. The 815BTX also has programmable alternating cycles for hands-off cleaning.

“3ntr manufacturers’ of 3D printers utilize a variety of support materials, some require chemicals for support removal, while others need only hot water. The 815BTX eliminates the need to have two separate cleaning machines or deal with the cost of frequent cleaning detergent changes to get the job done,” explained Frank Pedeflous, the President of Omegasonics. “It’s an all-in-one solution.”

Onkos Surgical and Insight Medical Exploring Augmented Reality in Musculoskeletal Oncology

California medical device company Insight Medical Systems has partnered with Onkos Surgical, Inc. on a pilot project to explore different applications and opportunities for using Insight Medical’s ARVIS (Augmented Reality Visualization and Information System) headset in musculoskeletal oncology, and possibly tumor surgery. Still under development, ARVIS uses its tracking and visualization capabilities to deliver efficient and precise surgical plan execution. The headset can project virtual models of a specific patient’s anatomy and implants into a surgeon’s field of view during a procedure, in order to show hidden anatomical structures and important measurements.

“Onkos Surgical is investing heavily in capabilities and technology to bring innovation to musculoskeletal oncology surgeons,” said Onkos CEO and Co-Founder Patrick Treacy. “Augmented reality technology has the potential of simplifying the complex and providing surgeons with input and feedback that may improve the precision of surgical planning and interoperative workflow. This technology fits well with our portfolio of Precision Oncology solutions.”

University of Western Australia Introduces New Model for Large-Scale 3D Facial Recognition

2D facial recognition is used often for applications in the IT, security, and surveillance industries, and relies on a computer model to know whether a person is legitimate or not. But this method has several issues, such as data being easily accessible online, which aren’t the case with more advanced 3D models. 3D models can address changes in facial expression, poses, scale, and texture, but the data can be hard to gather. Now, researchers from the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at the University of Western Australia (UWA) have developed a first of its kind system that can complete large-scale 3D facial recognition. The researchers, who published a paper on their work in Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, analyzed 3.1 million 3D scans of over 100,000 people, and trained the innovative new 3D Facial Recognition model (FR3DNet) to learn the identities of a large dataset of ‘known’ persons, then match a test face to one.

Dr. Syed Zulqarnain Gilani, who created the 3D model, said, “With off-the-shelf 3D cameras becoming cheap and affordable, the future for pure 3D face recognition does not seem far away.

“Our research shows that recognition performance on 3D scans is better and more robust. Your 3D scan could be in any pose, wearing glasses or a face mask, and laughing or just smiling and the deep model can recognise you in an instant.

“We hope that this research will help improve security on devices that use facial recognition to grant access to networks and systems.”

Nantes 3D Printed House Welcomes First Tenants

In 2017, a collaborative team of researchers in France began an ambitious project where an industrial 3D printer and a patented concrete construction process called BatiPrint3D were used to build a five-room house in just days. This spring, after 54 hours of 3D printing and four months of contractors adding the roof, windows, and doors, the team finished the 95-square-meter, environmentally-friendly YHNOVA house in the district of Nantes Bottière. The house features wheelchair access and digital controls, and its curved walls are said to reduce the effects of humidity. But it still only cost around £176,000 to build – 20% cheaper than an identical house manufactured with traditional methods. Now, the NMH Housing Award Committee has allocated the house to a French family, and Nordine and Nouria Ramdani, along with their three children, are being hailed as the world’s first family to live in a 3D printed house.

Nordine said, “It’s a big honour to be a part of this project.

“We lived in a block of council flats from the 60s, so it’s a big change for us.

“It’s really something amazing to be able to live in a place where there is a garden, and to have a detached house.”

The THNOVA team now believes they can 3D print the same house in just 33 hours.

Dream Pops Selling 3D Printed Popsicles at LA Starbucks

Vegan confection startup Dream Pops, headquartered in Los Angeles, creates organic, gluten- and soy-free, and vegan popsicles that are tasty, healthy, and made using 3D printed molds. These premier dairy-free popsicles consist of fruit and superfoods pureed together and cooled inside the molds at an accelerated rate with liquid nitrogen. Now, the startup has announced that its sweet treats are now available at five select Starbucks locations in the city – Third Street Promenade, La Brea and 4th, San Vincente and Barrington, Melrose and Stanley, and Wilshire and Santa Monica. The vegan ice cream pops, each of which contain fewer than 100 calories and seven grams of sugar, comes in five distinct flavors: Berry Dreams, Coconut Latte, Mango Rosemary, Vanilla Matcha, and a Dream Flight, which includes all four flavors.

“Our aim is to become the Willy Wonka of plant-based confections starting with our first product the Dream Pop and extending into adjacent better-for-you desserts,” said Dream Pops Co-Founder and CEO David Greenfield.

Dream Pops’ popsicles will be available at these Starbucks locations until October 5th.

3D Printed Stop Motion Characters

3D printing has been used many times to help create characters and backdrops for ads and commercials, music videos, and even movies that use popular stop motion animation. If you’re a fan of the stop motion show Robot Chicken, then you might also recognize the name of the full-service production company that creates it. California-based Stoopid Buddy Stoodios specializes in developing and producing stop-motion, CG, and 2D animated content, and also creates an animated stop motion comedy series called SuperMansion. The studio fabricates most of the show’s characters with a Perfactory 3D printer from EnvisionTEC.

“By utilizing 3D printing, we’re able to tell a story about superheroes and love and conflict and action and adventure,” said Kei Chong, Digital Design Supervisor at Stoopid Buddy Stoodios.

To learn more, check out the video below.

3D Printing for Animation | Stoopid Buddy Stoodios from EnvisionTEC on Vimeo.

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