3D printers have great applications in the world of medicine. For years we have been seeing how personalized prostheses can be printed, or even pieces that end up being embedded in bones and different parts of the patient’s body.
What had not been done until now is to print breast implants, something very common both for aesthetic reasons and for reconstructions among breast cancer survivors.
Silicone implants are widely used in this area, but they have several disadvantages, such as that they cannot reach body temperature in the cold and require replacement every 10 years or so.
Now they comment in The Guardian that there are two French companies, Lattice Medical and Healshape, and one from Israel, CollPlant, that have developed 3D printed models in this regard.
Companies are printing implants and beginning clinical trials, avoiding the icy feeling that silicone implants cause in cold weather.
The goal is to replace silicone with a safer material. Healshape will use a hydrogel to 3D print a soft implant material that can be absorbed by fat cells in around six to nine months; CollPlant will use a special collagen bioink extracted from tobacco leaves, genetically modified to produce human collagen; Lattice Medical will create a 3D printed cage made from a degradable biopolymer and under the chest area it has a small flap that can grow tissue to fill the cage as it is absorbed into the body.
They are three different approaches to achieve the same goal, more security, fewer associated problems and, who knows, better prices in the future.
