Nottingham University researchers are set to develop bespoke medical devices through additive manufacturing in a project funded by the EPSRC.
The team of Nottingham University will use the £6m grant to develop a 3D printing toolkit that will serve as an instruction manual to improve the path from research through development to clinical application.
A need for personalised, tailored and effective medical devices was identified, but the materials were not available, product development is tedious and the road to market is long.
Now Nottingham’s Center for Additive Manufacturing is tackling this problem by helping to remove a bottleneck preventing new innovative technology from entering the NHS.
Ricky Wildman, Professor of Chemical Engineering at Nottingham University, said: “A clear bottleneck in realizing innovations in medical technology – especially additive manufacturing innovations – is the limited choice of materials. Expanding our range is challenging as we don’t yet have great tools to predict the performance of materials, including whether a material is “3D printable”. For medical technology we have the added complication that we need a comprehensive understanding in order to comply with regulations.”
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Wildman continued, “This toolkit aims to remove that bottleneck by integrating a combination of experimental screening, computational modeling and machine learning to take the journey from ‘Here is my product idea’ to ‘What materials do I need and how?’ to level?’ and finally: ‘This design is the most optimal’. The toolkit allows users to create, guide, and expedite all of the steps required to assemble a device or therapy.”
To put together the toolkit, the team will consider three medical devices that have the potential to transform their respective fields. Wildman said the first is a “biopill,” which uses 4D printing or reactive polymers to create triggerable peptide-releasing tablets that improve the chances of orally delivering complex biomacromolecule therapeutics.
“Right now, such therapeutics have to be given either in very high doses or intravenously, neither of which is very helpful,” Wildman said.
A second device is a ‘gut patch’ that supplies cells and tissue to repair the gut lining damaged by diseases such as Crohn’s disease.
“These chronic diseases have poor outcomes, but if we were able to replicate the tissues and implant them, we would have a chance of alleviating the suffering of tens or hundreds of thousands of people a year. This requires multi-material stepped structures with complex shapes on cell length scales—perfect for additive manufacturing. But again, despite years of effort, the right materials are not available, and we need to find materials that work and can be used in 3D printing.”
Eventually, the team will look for more efficient ways to manufacture drugs by building enzyme-based mini-reactors that can be tuned to specific needs, and efficiently produce drugs or their intermediates with high yield and high specificity, a challenge that Wildman says difficult to achieve with current technology.
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