Another week is over, and with it a lot of interesting news published referring to the topic of 3D printing. We just picked a palmful of what appeared especially worth mentioning to us.
Enjoy reading and Happy Easter!

The Time Is Ripe for a Revolution in Post-Processing of 3D Prints  – World’s First Finishing Tool

The Pittsburgh (PA, USA) based company Retouch3D announced this week to start a crowdfunding campaign to bring a hand-held heated tool with variable heat settings and interchangeable tips in the 3D printing world. Retouch 3D promises that this specifically for 3D printing designed tool will allow makers to clean-up 3D prints with the aid of temperatures matched to the thermal properties of the printing material. The company chose an ergonomic design to offer the user comfort and precision at the same time to be able to accurately remove support material, refining layer imperfections and stringing as well as blending print surfaces and infill gaps. At the moment, the tool works for PLA, ABD and resin.
This tool seems to be very welcome in the community as users are starting to experiment with more challenging shapes and geometries, and errors remain common, even though 3D printers are getting more and more precise. We are looking forward to testing this tool.

More Progress in the Field of Printing Implants  – Nose, Ears and Thyroid Are Available Now

3D printed implants gain a paramount importance. Hence, experts are predicting a very bright future for 3D printing technology in the Medtech branch. This week a team of researchers from the VU Medical Center (Amsterdam, NL) announced to start a program which focuses on 3D printing cartilage printing. Cartilages are of capital importance in the field of plastic surgery (nose, ears), where implants are custom made for a wide range of patients which suffer e.g. from a birth defect, burn wounds etc. Earlier this week the Russian Medtech company ‘3D Bio printing solutions‘ announced that it is set to transplant a 3D printed thyroid gland to living rats. In case the transplantation will show a positive outcome, it could be a hope for all patients who suffer from ‘Hypothyroidism‘, a medical condition caused by an underproduction of thyroid hormone. The company started to focus on a thyroid gland as its structure is not only known to be relatively simple but also the thyroid cancer is ranked with over 300.000 diagnoses on spot 16 of the most diagnosed cancers.