It’s the greatest fear of them all, for the wives and family members of construction workers, police officers, firemen, and military servicemen. Each year, thousands of blue collar workers are severely hurt, and many times killed in work related accidents. These accidents occur at random and oftentimes there is no one at fault.
Bradley White, 16, was suffering from an irregular heartbeat. The medical staff at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital was proceeding cautiously as they knew the problem was being caused by a tumor on his heart. Doctors found the tumor when Bradley was three. Having enduring a childhood rife with surgeries (several open-heart) and the insertion of a defibrillator implanted to protect him from sudden cardiac death as a young child, obviously there was more than enough reason to take extra precautions.
One area which has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of 3D printing, has been that of low cost prosthetic devices. For the most part, these devices have been primarily prosthetic hands, thanks in part to organizations such as E-nabling The Future, who offer free designs for such devices.
If you’ve ever bought a wedding dress, or know someone who has, you learn quickly that it is difficult to purchase something that fits perfectly right off the rack. Instead, a series of alterations are generally required in order to match body to garment. Now, imagine you were buying new knees and were required to be satisfied with what was available “off the rack.” This is the situation in which people have found themselves in the past. While replacement knees do come in different sizes, just as with the wedding dress, there is a difference between a general size category and a perfect fit.
In a South African hospital, two patients had surgery to replace their mandibles with titanium implants created with 3D printing technology after they lost portions of their faces due to cancer and ancillary diseases.
Bioengineers have been steadily advancing toward the goal of building lab-grown organs out of a patient’s own cells, but a few major challenges remain. One of them is making vasculature, the blood vessel plumbing system that delivers nutrients and remove waste from the cells on the inside of a mass of tissue. Without these blood vessels, interior cells quickly suffocate and die.
According to the United States Renal Data System, End-Stage Renal Disease resulted in over 90,000 deaths in 2009. Solving the problem has been difficult at best as treatment options aimed at dealing with renal disease are basically limited to organ transplantation or dialysis.
The BIOFABRIS is a National Institute of S&T in Biomanufacturing of multidisciplinary,
located at the Chemical Engineering Campus of UNICAMP, character that aims to integrate computational tools, synthesis and development of new biomaterials and application of engineering techniques to obtain biomedical devices (prostheses and orthopedic orthoses) and substitutes for live biological tissues or defective or missing human organs.