3D Bioprinting Technology Sample Essay

Introduction

            This formative paper summarizes the history of the emerging technology in the globe today, which is 3D Bioprinting, by explaining how the system can improve care coordination, patient safety, quality improvement, cost containment, and patient engagement. The paper also identifies and explains the pros and cons of the system being discussed. It will also identify and explain the ethical, legal, and standards that impact this emerging technology. Finally, the paper will evaluate the potential barriers to the further development of this emerging technology. This new field of the invention in the healthcare industry enables physicians to easily print bio tissues, joint replacement, organs, and limbs. It can also help in creating surgical tools and medical services.

History of 3D Bioprinting

            Three-dimensional (3D) bioprinting is defined as utilizing this invention, like techniques to put together biomaterials, growth factors, and cells to fabricate biomedical parts that aim to limit natural tissue. However, the first 3D Bioprinting was invented by Hull Charles in 1983, which helped in creating 3D printing models (Thayer, Martinez & Gatenholm, 2020). Hull founded the 3D systems in 1986, which was the main company for manufacturing 3D materials and printers to go in them. The technology can be traced at Clemson University by the Boland Thomas group, who developed the first bioprinter in the world in the early 2000s. In 2003, Thomas used a modified office. This inkjet printer helps focus on the bioprinting field, which has become the basis of modern bioprinters in the healthcare industry. The first bioprinter to use living cells without the requirement of cell scaffolding was in 2004 by Forgacs Gabor (Thayer, Martinez & Gatenholm, 2020). He further created another bioprinter in 2007, which was used as a commercial bioprinter. From 2010 to 2016, there was increased competition and innovation by bioprinting companies like Allevi and Cellink. However, in 2020 America was cleared by FDA in making an advanced 3D bioprinting which they printed 3D printed bones.

The technology covers a larger range of biomaterials and Bioprinting. 3D printing is another new technology invention in the healthcare industry that is starting to prove to be transformative (Chen et al., 2020). This new field of the invention in the healthcare industry enables physicians to easily print bio tissues, joint replacement, organs, and limbs. It can also help in creating surgical tools and medical services. Further, the technology can be used in pharmacology, where there is an ongoing experimental procedure for printing other medications and pills. The development of this technology was to help researchers in developing critical approaches to produce living organs that are normally constructed with the needed mechanical and biological approaches (Chen et al., 2020). 3D Bioprinting is built on three approaches: mini tissue building blocks, autonomous self-assembly, and biomimicry.

Systems Improvement

• Care Coordination

This technology can be improved in care coordination for patients through a deliberate organization of patient care activities and data sharing among all the patients to achieve more effective and safer care (Murphy, De Coppi & Atala, 2020). Thus, this shows how this system can improve care coordination for patients due to the high and large production of effective body parts which are personalized.

• Patient Safety

The acceleration and increased use of 3D Bioprinting in the healthcare industry have opened up questions regarding the efficacy and safety in the use of this technology. The technology helps in facing the lack of organ donors among patients where it avoids the risks of rejections since these body parts or organs made by this technology are made using the patients’ cells (Chen et al., 2020). This creation of body parts helps a patient in times of need to be used in their body to replace dead or weaned out cells without having a human transplant.

• Quality Improvement

The 3D bioprinting technology offers to create living and functional 3D human tissues of specific organs. These 3D organs help patients improve the quality since they provide much accurate mimicry to reality which results in predictive results for drug patients, thus reducing late-stage failures.

• Cost Containment

3D bioprinting technology is a single-step manufacturing process that saves time and thus costs that could be associated when using a different machine for manufacturing. This is because the technology offers customized personal medical equipment, drugs, and cost-effective products, and it also increases productivity, which has enhanced collaboration among the patients and medical sector (Murphy, De Coppi & Atala, 2020).

• Patient Engagement

Medical 3D Bioprinting is now being considered a viable method in clinical applications. This technology has combined interventions with activations designed to promote positive patient behaviors and increase activation, which has enabled the patients to receive preventive care (Chen et al., 2020). The production of exact equipment and body parts has helped improve treatment and surgery, which allows patients to engage much closer with this technology.

Pros and Cons of the 3D Bioprinting

Pros

1. Rapid Medical Prototyping

3D bioprinting is cheaper than other technologies and at times faster than the normal manufacturing standard methods. This shows that this technology can rapidly manufacture, test, print, and design device for medical prototypes. Most medical or healthcare industries currently implement 3D Bioprinting to rapidly test and develop drug delivery services such as injectors and inhalers (Tan et al., 2021). The technology is more beneficial and quicker than other traditional manufacturing and designing methods, which may take weeks to develop and produce a new prototype. This shows that 3D Bioprinting is much quicker in designing, developing, and testing the needed prototype in a few days.

• Just In Time on High Demand Devices/Reduced Trafficking

Traditional implants can take more days or even weeks to manufacture and design the needed patient demand, especially when the patient needs a customized device. This is because of the 3D printing speed, which makes it necessary for manufacturers to fast and quickly manufacture in time the needed patient demand. The technology is widely implemented in various medical companies to reduce the time required to develop more bone implants (Tan et al., 2021). Due to the personalized medical services, 3D printing has met the just-in-time approach to meet the rising demand for personal devices. This has made many patients get their personalized devices in time, much better than in the past centuries. The flexibility and speed of the approach have helped reducing the patient waiting times, and it also lowered the complications that are likely arise due to unavailable or delayed medical devices.

• Patient-Specific Implants

3D Bioprinting can manufacture medical devices, mainly tailored for patients’ specific surgery or specific physiology, which makes it more effective in producing mass production of the devices. Patient-specific and customized surgery printed implants and tools are being utilized in surgery of the knee. Most medical staff have found that the technology reduces pain levels and speed up recovery among the patients (Tan et al., 2021). Thus, this technology emergence has made some of the manufacturers to creating their own particular devices for medical.

Cons

1. Not Eco-Friendly

This technology is much beneficial in various resources like energy and plastic. This technology will make plans such as the manufacturers for medical devices who wants to reduce on energy emissions or used produced and if they want to go lean. 3D printing itself is not that necessarily wasteful since manufacturers can reduce this waste. An example is because 3D technology utilizes only the that may end up as the final material. Thus, no materials will end up on the industry floor, which is less wasteful compared to traditional manufacturing. The main drawback of this technology is that high and plastic energy is not good for the environment, which makes the healthcare device manufacturing accept the cost associated with environment or rather search for other alternatives (Liu et al., 2018).

• Limited Options of 3D Bioprinting Material

3D printing lacks some materials such as composite or other devices that need special nonprintable components that may be challenging to 3D printing without diverging (Liu et al., 2018). Some manufacturers may find it challenging to get the right materials that seem to be some years or months out of reach. However, few materials such as fabrics seem to be impossible or difficult to print, forcing manufacturers to rely mostly on traditional methods of manufacturing to it entirely or partially.

• 3D Printed Objects Inconsistent Quality

3D bioprinting does not always produce the top-line results that are needed by the high demanding market. The objects or devices being produced may vary in dimensions and bumps or textures when usually there should be a smooth surface when introducing it to in development process (Liu et al., 2018).  Thus, this device being produced by this technology needs to be worked out by a labor force before the organs or body parts are introduced to the patients. This means that manufacturers need to add extra labor to fix such mistakes to avoid the 3D printer from making repetitive mistake severely. These additional labor costs can cancel costs that would have otherwise been saved by switching to the 3D printing process.

Ethical and Legal Standards that Impact 3D Bioprinting Technology

Ethical Issues

            The development of this technology has raised deep questions related to technological design issues, biotechnological projects of human enhancement, and human nature. The main aspect that needs to be taken into consideration while evaluating the ethics of this technology is set by the digital model. Another common ethical challenge is the ethics of untested paradigms of living cells (Gilbert et al., 2018). This technology has remained an untested clinical paradigm that is much based on the human body living cells. These ethical issues impact this technology because human beings have many risks, such as migrations and dislodgement of implants, cancer, and teratoma.

Legal issues

            The current legal issues that may impact the 3D bioprinting technology are the design, patent, and copyright issues. Design rights are seen to be the most potentially useful for manufactures due to the intellectual property. The product manufacturing that incorporates the design which is protected will be seen as illegal if the third party undertakes it for commercial purposes is seen to be an infringement of behavior. The design rights infringement of this technology raises the issues in the global of fair compensation (Gilbert et al., 2018). On the other hand, copyright issues the right holder of this technology must provide and identify first the end-user. Thus, courts should know that copyright is issued to technology progress and a solution that shows that the company has copyright protection of a 3D CAD file to be used as a computer program.

Barriers for Further Development of 3D Bioprinting

• Lack of enough Processes and Materials

3D Bioprinting technology requires a lot of understanding properties in different processes, biocompatibility, and the use of mixed materials to produce devices and part organs of a human being (Tang, Rich & Chen., 2021). This situation of lack of enough materials in the technology serves as the main barrier for further development of this technology in the healthcare industry.

• Skills and education in design

The use of this technology requires appropriate skills when designing, producing, and testing the materials. Thus, for adoption and development of this technology, it needs widespread education and guides program on 3D printing design, and there is a widespread reduction in AM skilled designers and the awareness and up skilled labor force to do adopt and develop this technology ((Tang, Rich & Chen., 2021). This makes the technology have some barriers for further development.

• Equipment Costs/Financing and Investment

The costs of running this technology from development to testing are much expensive for many healthcare companies. This forces them to avoid using this technology in the developing world, forcing them to implement the traditional methods, especially for small manufacturing companies. This cost serves as a barrier for further development because they have to provide better information to their customer patient by increasing awareness, leading to the use of much finances in adopting the technology (Tang, Rich & Chen., 2021). The need for data libraries for standard tests makes only large healthcare companies implement this technology.

• Risk of Legal Implication

This technology is required by law to meet different standards. Most 3D printing technologies lack perceived standards for processes, materials, and testing, which makes the technology slow (Tang, Rich & Chen., 2021). This barrier also limits healthcare companies from adopting this technology since they must practice openness to encourage more adoption for commercial protection.

Conclusion

            3D bioprinting is considered to be a largely emerging industry that could benefit both veterinary and human medicine. Various advancements in this system have led to the generation of in vivo and in vitro tissue models, improved vascularization of printed tissues, and higher resolution bioprinters. The technology also covers a larger range of biomaterials and Bioprinting. 3D printing is another new technology invention in the healthcare industry that is starting to prove to be transformative (Chen et al., 2020). This new field of the invention in the healthcare industry enables physicians to easily print bio tissues, joint replacement, organs, and limbs. It can also help in creating surgical tools and medical services. The development of this technology was to help researchers in developing critical approaches to produce living organs that are normally constructed with the needed mechanical and biological approaches.

References

Chen, Y., Zhang, J., Liu, X., Wang, S., Tao, J., Huang, Y., … & Gou, M. (2020). Noninvasive in vivo 3D bioprinting. Science advances, 6(23), eaba7406.

Gilbert, F., O’Connell, C. D., Mladenovska, T., & Dodds, S. (2018). Print me an organ? Ethical and regulatory issues are emerging from 3D Bioprinting in medicine. Science and engineering ethics, 24(1), 73-91.

Liu, F., Liu, C., Chen, Q., Ao, Q., Tian, X., Fan, J., … & Wang, X. (2018). Progress in organ 3D bioprinting. International Journal of Bioprinting, 4(1).

Murphy, S. V., De Coppi, P., & Atala, A. (2020). Opportunities and challenges of translational 3D Bioprinting. Nature biomedical engineering, 4(4), 370-380.

Tan, B., Gan, S., Wang, X., Liu, W., & Li, X. (2021). Applications of 3D Bioprinting in tissue engineering: advantages, deficiencies, improvements, and future perspectives. Journal of Materials Chemistry B.

Tang, M., Rich, J. N., & Chen, S. (2021). Biomaterials and 3D Bioprinting Strategies to Model Glioblastoma and the Blood-Brain Barrier. Advanced Materials, 33(5), 2004776.

Thayer, P., Martinez, H., & Gatenholm, E. (2020). History and trends of 3D Bioprinting. In 3D Bioprinting (pp. 3-18). Humana, New York, NY.