About
Bone is the second tissue that is being transplanted every year. For engineering bone implants, ceramics are commonly used, due to their high stifness and strenght.
However, the current medical treatments used for bone healing come along with several shortcomings. First of all, the gold standard autografts are short in supply and cause pain to the donor site, while allografts or xenografts may cause disease transmission and thus immune rejection.
Second, traditional fabrication methods cannot provide a ceramic implant with adequate mechanical properties for bone healing applications, nor an architecture customizable for every patients bone defect. Third, surgeons often have to adjust a graft before or even during a surgical operation, which is highly inefficient and causing unnecessary risk.
To overcome all these challenges, engineered implants have gained importance the last decades. With the help of advanced software and materials, additive manufacturing is expected to revolutionize personalized health care by printing customized, mechanically stable, safer and aesthetically excellent implants. With Z3DLabs, we are one step ahead of this revolution.
Our Vision
Our vision is to establish a 3D-printing lab for Dutch hospitals – in co-operation with software and additive manufacturing experts, as well as material engineers, medical centers and universities – a lab which will produce biocompatible, durable and customizable bone implants. To realize our vision, one of the projects we are working on now is creating ceramic 3D-printed spinal cage implants with graphene oxide.
About
Bone is the second tissue that is being transplanted every year. For engineering bone implants, ceramics are commonly used, due to their high stifness and strenght.
However, the current medical treatments used for bone healing come along with several shortcomings. First of all, the gold standard autografts are short in supply and cause pain to the donor site, while allografts or xenografts may cause disease transmission and thus immune rejection.
Second, traditional fabrication methods cannot provide a ceramic implant with adequate mechanical properties for bone healing applications, nor an architecture customizable for every patients bone defect. Third, surgeons often have to adjust a graft before or even during a surgical operation, which is highly inefficient and causing unnecessary risk.
To overcome all these challenges, engineered implants have gained importance the last decades. With the help of advanced software and materials, additive manufacturing is expected to revolutionize personalized health care by printing customized, mechanically stable, safer and aesthetically excellent implants. With Z3DLabs, we are one step ahead of this revolution.
Our Vision
Our vision is to establish a 3D-printing lab for Dutch hospitals – in co-operation with software and additive manufacturing experts, as well as material engineers, medical centers and universities – a lab which will produce biocompatible, durable and customizable bone implants. To realize our vision, one of the projects we are working on now is creating ceramic 3D-printed spinal cage implants with graphene oxide.