Tencent Technology News May 31, 2013 News, the first World 3D Printing Technology Industry Conference was held on May 29-31 at the China World Hotel in Beijing. Liu Qing, chairman of the board, delivered a speech at the meeting. Liu Qing said that 3D printing can precisely control the size of the pores of the scaffold, and can be used as cell culture scaffolds and implantable products, which is the advantage of 3D printing at present.

Liu Qing said that 3D printing is more about personalized applications. Each patient has different height and weight, and each organ size is different. Personalized applications are an area that everyone is very optimistic about.

The following is the speech transcript of Chairman Liu Qing:

Liu Qing: Good morning, everyone! I am very happy to have the opportunity to talk to you about the application of 3D printing in biology. This morning, the three professors have already talked a lot, because I work in an enterprise. According to my understanding and our work, I will add a little more.

Today, I mainly introduce the current situation of development, and then briefly introduce what our company mainly does, our company's technology and products, and finally talk about the current situation and challenges, and the future development direction based on our work experience in this area over the past few years.

We talked a lot today. According to the clinical application of medical images, it is easy to obtain models of the patient's soft tissues and tissues, such as CT or MRI. After three-dimensional image reconstruction in the laboratory, you can see the visual images on the screen. of. Now everyone knows a lot of 3D printers. If you have an image, you can input this file and print it out with a 3D printer. This is the principle of 3D reconstruction in medicine.

Now the development of CT images and MRI images provides us with this possibility. Before this thing, we could not do this at all. 3D reconstruction, according to the current level of technology, we can easily reconstruct both soft tissue and hard tissue. As you can see here, we can easily reconstruct the bones and spine. If you are interested in the blood vessels of this patient, you can I saw a stent was placed on this vessel. If you are interested in the heart, the aorta, and the kidneys, there are technologies to do these now, and these are not big problems. What is the most difficult point? How do you perform the reconstruction when you are reconstructing in 3D? The real reflection of the situation in the body is a more challenging problem.

You can also see these two pictures. The three-dimensional structure on the left is very clear. If you use inappropriate methods or the technology is not good enough, you will get the situation on the right. So, if you accidentally get the picture on the right when you are doing 3D reconstruction, then the resulting model is not a real model. We often encounter such a problem in our work, that is, how to ensure that the 3D reconstruction is consistent with the in vivo model. The real environment is the same and requires certain techniques.

At present, there are many kinds of 3D printing technologies. With images, you can use 3D printing technology to print models, such as 3DP, SLS, SL, and FDM. Several professors have just mentioned, bioprinting, how do I print cells , the combination of gelatin and light curing methods, the main feature is that I can print out cells and use them as engineering organs in vitro.

The most common application now is to use 3D printing to make pathological models. For example, the doctor is about to open an operation and wants to make a surgical plan before the operation. Although CT models and CT scans can also give a general impression, it is still not as good as having one in your hand. The real model is so convenient, so it is also used in pathological model making.

Since last year, 3D printing has become very popular, and there have been reports recently that it can print out the human liver in vitro. When I do liver transplantation, if I print out the liver model in advance, I will find a suitable donor based on the size of the model. Make sure to plan well before surgery. The heart can also be printed out. According to the data, all the organs can be printed out through 3D printing, and the preoperative planning and program design can be done.

Recently, a company in the United States called Ofard Performance Materials has repaired the skull and it has been very successful. In addition, in Europe, there is a company called LayerWise. This company used the laser sintering technology for the first time to implant a joint of the lower jaw into the human body with titanium alloy. These are two of the more well-known examples in the field of 3D printing. 3D printing is more focused on personalized applications. The height and weight of each patient are different, and the size of each organ is different. Personalized applications are an area that everyone is very optimistic about. There are also oral teeth, each patient is different.

Tissue-engineered organs, according to the statistics of the United Organ Sharing Organization in the United States, there are at least 1.13 million patients waiting for organ transplantation, but there are very few organs, but only 1%-2% of the donors are suitable for organ donation and implantation. It does not mean that the organs of every deceased patient can be used, so many patients died in the painful waiting because they could not wait for the organs. Therefore, the development of tissue engineering and regenerative medicine engineering has been very fast in the past two years. If one day in the future, I have cultivated a lot of hearts in vitro for heart transplant patients. Just get in. The most famous is the culture of the bladder in vitro. There is also the 2008 mouse heart culture test.

Cornell University is also printing ears, and even wants to print intervertebral discs, because the damage of intervertebral discs is very serious. Due to people's long-term office work, intervertebral discs are prone to herniation, which is also a very serious disease. Therefore, I want to use the method of tissue engineering to print out the intervertebral disc with cells, implant it into the patient after in vitro culture, and never replace the diseased intervertebral disc of the patient. This is a good idea, and it is still in the stage of testing. . So, now we know that this field is developing very fast, because it can potentially solve many health problems facing modern people.

Briefly introduce that we have two series of 3D stents, one is polystyrene, I would like to briefly introduce the biggest benefit that 3D printing technology brings to us, you can design this structure. This is a four-layer polystyrene structure, each layer is represented by a different color, the arrangement of the first and third layers is just staggered, and the second and fourth layers are also staggered. The polystyrene material itself is Transparent material, you can see four colors from top to bottom, what does it mean? We know that if you use opaque material as a scaffold, you can see it under a microscope, and it is difficult to see the growth of cells inside, that is After my cells are planted, to what extent they are raised, whether they are dead, or what they will look like, you have no idea at all. We now use a polystyrene petri dish, which has a huge advantage in that you can always take it out and look at it under a light microscope, and if you are not satisfied with its growth, you can put it in and let it continue to grow. We designed this polystyrene bracket structure to allow you to do the same thing, you can look at it layer by layer under an optical microscope, by adjusting the focusing platform, it's a very unique design, only 3D printed This can be done.

We know that when cells grow on scaffolds, it can be affected by porosity and the size of pores, so many people are doing tissue engineering scaffolds by themselves. The pores are different, sponge-like, and various pore structures. , there is no way to do a uniform comparison. Therefore, the US National Institute of Standards screened all the scaffolds on the market, and finally selected the scaffold made of 3D printing as the standard tissue engineering reference scaffold.

We use 3D printing technology to make repairable vascular stents. Another largest field is absorbable stents. There are about 100 million people in my country with diabetes. These patients either do bypass or put a stent. Now there are many international Companies are all doing research on absorbability. We don't need to make tubes, but directly use 3D printing to do it. We already have a patent in this area.

In addition, 3D printing has many applications in tissue engineering. For example, for vascular tissue engineering, many patients cannot solve the problem by placing vascular stents. Take a small blood vessel. Tissue engineering is to solve this problem, that is, can I grow a blood vessel in vitro, if you need a bypass, you don't need to take a vein from another part

What are the challenges we are facing now? Our current situation, including the examples we talked about, including our company's products, our 3D printing can solve some problems that cannot be solved at present, such as some personalized products, 3D printing can be very accurate The control of the size of the pores of the scaffold can make cell culture scaffolds and implantable products, which is the advantage of 3D printing at present. Where is the problem? The scope of application is not wide enough. I heard some reports yesterday, that is, 3D printing is not an alternative technology, it is only suitable for personalized products, and the cost of large-scale production is the lowest, so this is what we are now the problem we are facing.

In addition, 3D printing technology is still relatively slow. It takes time to print slightly larger things, and sometimes the cost is naturally high. In addition, if you do personalized implantation, when you do clinical experiments, the size of the products implanted by each patient is different. When designing the clinical plan, how to count the samples are all the problems we are facing now. for further discussion.

The future development direction, what problems do we have now, we need to solve these problems. So, we hope that with this demand in the future, technology will develop to further increase the speed of our 3D printing and bring our costs down. I hope that we will develop and expand the application field in the future. Now to give a simple example, the vascular stent should be a market of billions of dollars every year. If this thing can be successful, 3D printing will bring us a very positive impact.

3D printing must be a multidisciplinary cooperation in medicine. We have just seen that the development of imaging science, computer data processing, electromechanical, and some of our existing 3D printers cannot meet the requirements. For example, our company's machines are completely If you do it yourself, you need talents in electro-mechanical fields, and you need to understand materials. Therefore, multi-disciplinary and interdisciplinary cooperation must have cooperation to go further. The most important point in the future is the development of material processing technology, which is suitable for 3D printing new materials can print out some new materials that can be directly implanted into the human body. For example, the polylactic acid material we use now is not the best. Whether it can print better materials in the future is still in the research process. For example, we can make a muscle shape, a heart shape, and it can feel like a muscle and a heart, but we can't do it at present. These are the problems we need to solve in the future.

Time is concerned, I will briefly introduce it here, thank you!