Assisting Bone Growth By Using a Hyperelastic 3D Printed Graft

3D Printed Bone Grafts of human vertebrae (Cassie Martin)

3D printing has become widely known as a low cost and time efficient method to make custom structures that can perform various tasks.

A recent interest among the scientific community is the practicality of using 3D printed parts to solve or improve any issues in the medical field. Just some examples of technology in the medical field that has already been created using 3D printing include blood vessels, low-cost prosthetics, and anatomical models. Now, material scientists at Northwestern University have developed a very flexible 3D printed “bone” that can be implanted in the body to help repair or regenerate real bones.

Hydraulic Press Demonstrating the strength of the Bone Grafts (A.E. Jakus)

These bone grafts are made from combining an elastic biodegradable polymer with a mineral called hydroxyapatite, which naturally exists in all bones in the body. Researcher Ramille Shah and her team added human stem cells to the graft, causing real bones to grow from any weak or defected areas in the body.

They tested this “hyperelastic bone” on rat tissue in the spine and on the skull of a rhesus macaque (monkey) to which it was able to successfully grow healthy bones.

Rhesus Macaque3D printed bone construction (Ramille Shah Northwestern University)

One theory that Adam Jakus, a researcher from Shah’s team, has that explains this growth is that cells perceive the bone graft as a faulty or weak bone and take extra measures to correct it, resulting in the full repair of the real bone.

Shah foresees that once the bone graft is perfected, printers can be implemented in hospitals so that a bone implant or treatment can be administered immediately.

“Our vision is to have 3D printers in a hospital setting where we provide the hyperelastic bone ink, so surgeons can make individual implants within 24 hours. You could make off-the-shelf, or patient-specific implants using scans from patients.” — Ramille Shah, Northwestern University

It is truly amazing how 3D printing has evolved to be used more and more in the medical world. The hyperelastic 3D bone graft is just one more example of the incredible technology being made to advance the medical field.