Printing is a word familiar to most people in our modern day society. We use computers to print off important documents, letters, and posters that are passed around and shared in our communities every day. 3D printing on the other hand has only really just started to gain traction and popularity in the past few years. This revolutionary style of printing is not only neat to look at, but is also revolutionizing different fields with new inventions every day. But can it save lives?

A basic understanding of 3D printing is needed to recognize how some of the advancements discussed below are possible. 3dprinting.com offers in-depth breakdowns of the differing processes different printers use to create their respective objects. In a basic sense, most 3D printers have a tray where the objects are printed onto, and a nozzle that does the printing. Materials such as plastic and metal are fed into the nozzle, and are heated to a point where they melt. The printer then takes 3D model data created on a computer, and starts to build the model in layers. With this understanding we can look at some neat innovations that this relatively new technology is capable of creating.

The field of medicine is seeing some incredible improvements that are literally saving lives this very day. One specific practice of medicine fully utilizing 3D printing is surgery. Scientists and doctors alike have been studying the human body, and have been able to recreate working human organs usable in surgical procedures. Below is a TED talk where surgeon Anthony Atala speaks about the process of 3D printing human organs and shows experimental designs currently being tested for use in real surgical procedures. (Around the 11 minute mark.)

Another field of medicine benefiting from 3D printing is bio medical engineering. This gets down to the really finite forms of printing. People in this field study cellular production and structures. Alan Faulkner-Jones, a research associate at Heriot-Watt University explains how 3D printing is affecting their studies on the body. “…you can use patient-specific cells, and you can work out how a person would respond to a particular medicine and then personalise the medicine for that person.”. Being able to recreate cells that can be placed into the human body can lead to amazing discoveries in the body at the cellular level as well as help solve issues that revolve around cells.

Cells and organs are great, but what about bones? 3D printing has that covered as well. The Salamanca University Hospital in Spain was able to successfully perform an operation that gave a 54 year old man with a tumor in his chest a 3D printed section of a ribcage. It is described on Medical News Today, that the reconstruction process would have been very difficult due to the “geometry of the chest cavity”. The progress in 3D printing has allowed doctors to find new, less problematic procedures to helping injured patients. And on less severe levels, 3D printing has also been used in the production of prosthetic limbs.

At this point 3D printers may seem like little miracle printers, but is this even viable in terms of cost? These kind of procedures cannot be cheap. And in reality, it isn’t cheap. The Harvard Business Review offers some insight, suggesting that the individual materials the printer uses can be expensive, as well as operating costs that are proportional to the cost of any parts printed. We can see this right here at Penn State. In high school, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip to the industrial 3D printing lab located at Innovation Park. The printers there are capable of printing all sorts of different materials, but the main printer was a massive piece of engineering. Our tour guide described to us that the specific printer cost several thousand dollars per minute just to run. 3D printing is still in its early stages, but they are certainly expensive early stages.

In conclusion, our society has seen major improvements in the medical field in regards to the success of 3D printing. So, 3D printing does have the ability to save lives. How effective this process is in its current state is questionable at best. And we are still in the beginning stages. During our conversation about the long term effects of smoking, Andrew discussed how we are now at a stage where we know the risks associated with smoking. It will take many years before an answer to how effective this process will be in the future. But it isn’t out of the question that it will certainly have some impact on the future of saving lives around the world.