Medicine is advancing faster than ever before. In 2024, scientists made significant progress and breakthrough discoveries across disciplines from beginning the world’s first routine childhood immunisation campaign against malaria to clinically testing an affordable, copycat version of insulin. As scientists across the healthcare and biopharmaceutical industries look to get life-changing therapies to patients as quickly as possible, they often turn to new technologies to solve long-standing pain points and move research forward. In recent years, one technology has stood out as a driver of innovation in medication delivery: 3D printing.

Trends of miniaturisation and personalised medicine have made 3D printing not just a useful tool, but, in many cases, a necessity to bypass the roadblocks of traditional manufacturing methods, such as machining or moulding, which are often costly and offer little flexibility throughout the design process. When developing medical devices that have micron-level features, such as microneedle vaccine patches, micro 3D printing becomes the only viable technology for cost-effectively producing the devices with the required precision and accuracy.

Overcoming design challenges with 3D printing

Researchers on the interventional radiology team at City of Hope Cancer Center Duarte are using cutting-edge therapies and technologies to diagnose, treat and manage many types of cancer. Recently, the team found that micro 3D printing could help to enhance a drug delivery method for liver cancer treatment. Delivering high-dose drugs directly to liver tumors has the potential to offer life-saving treatment options for patients, but finding a device that’s suitable for intratumoral injection is challenging. While traditional intratumoral infusion catheters have been used to treat tumors in other areas, such as in the brain, catheters placed to treat liver tumors are subject to migration due to breathing movements, which can diminish treatment efficacy.

According to the team’s research published in Springer Nature, they turned to a design inspired by the barbed structure of bee stingers, as they needed an intratumoral catheter that could hold itself in place and accurately deliver the medication. The innovative design included extremely small features – 0.4 millimeter holes to deliver the medication and finely detailed barbs to hold the catheter in place – that needed to be made with high precision and accuracy. Traditional manufacturing methods, and even 3D printing technologies like stereolithography (SLA), couldn’t meet the precision needed for these ultra-small and intricate design features, which is what drove the research team to consider a specialized, high precision micro 3D printing solution.

Using Projection Micro Stereolithography (PµSL) technology, a high-resolution 3D printing technique, the team was able to fabricate the catheter’s complex structure with micro-sized barbs, sideholds and a central channel. Not only was the micro 3D printer able to create a highly precise design, but the catheter was able to perform the two required functions of staying in position at the target injection site and maintaining uniform drug delivery into the target site. Early testing has demonstrated that the barbed sidehold catheter saw 183-fold higher localized drug concentrations when compared to standard intravenous (IV) injection of the drug. This method has promising implications for targeted and personalized cancer treatments.

Fabricating the future of medical devices

Although still in pre-clinical stages, this research illustrates a significant shift in the way scientists think about solving healthcare’s most pressing problems. While miniaturization serves as a driver of innovation across the medical technology industry, there are few technologies that can deliver the level of precision and specificity required by these cutting-edge devices to push the industry forward and support better patient care.

Micro 3D printing has a unique ability to produce parts with tight tolerances where precision, accuracy and ultra-high resolution are also required. What’s more is that micro 3D printing offers a cost-effective solution for patient-specific solutions, so devices can be customized based on patient or treatment needs.

From prototyping to production, micro 3D printing solutions can offer a way forward for many industries, and this barbed sidehold catheter is a great example of pushing the boundaries in healthcare. By combining cutting-edge additive manufacturing technology with design innovation, the team was able to produce a device that was previously impossible to manufacture with traditional methods. Going forward, medical engineers should consider turning to micro 3D printing solutions to solve the industry’s longstanding challenges – the outcomes may be revolutionary.

Boston Micro Fabrication

Source：Med-Tech Insights