Doctors Print Replacement Jaw from 3D printer

3D printers just keep on amazing. First they printed plastic and metal, then experimental organs, now the technology is being used on an actual patient missing part of her jaw.

An 83 year old woman was diagnosed with progressive osteomyelitis, a condition that causes inflammation in bones. In this case, the condition affected her jaw, and the doctors decided the only safe course was to remove it. Normally, this would have left the woman horribly disfigured. The only way to repair such damage is through complex, highly precise and slightly dangerous bone and soft tissue transplants, to rebuild the jaw from existing structures.

But times have changed. Collaborating with a 3D printing company called Xilloc, the team modeled and printed a complete replacement jaw made of titanium. Once the SLS (Solid Laser Sintering, it is a form of 3d printing that fuses metal powder together with a high-powered laser) printer finished printing the jaw, the team coated it in a layer of bio-compatible ceramic.

Then the team anchored it to the existing structure, and the surgery was done. The entire procedure took only a couple of hours, about as long as printing the replacement jaw took.

While the jaw is slightly heavier than the bone it replaces (it is made of titanium, after all) the team says that there have been few complications.

To say that this bodes well for the future of prosthetics would be an understatement. The team was able to print an entire replacement part for a human being in hours, negating the need for complex, tricky surgery that would have taken much longer. This couldn’t have been done a decade ago, probably not even 5 years ago.

And yet again, 3d printing shows that it has quite the future in store for us.

The Verge