Nabilah Safira
TechInAfrica – Founded in 2017, Swiss-based 3D printing startup Spectroplast managed to extract a seed round of 1.5 M Swiss franc (which is just about the same as dollars) from Germany’s AM Ventures Holding this year, helping the company’s move to spin-out from ETH Zürich. With the new investment, Peter Stefanov, the co-founder, and CTO of Spectroplast plans to focus on having openings available for potential members, with the job of operating the 3D printers.
As much as common the technology of 3D printer is in the hardware industry, the materials are still scarce since incorporating the ones that could produce a final product is a challenging task. In Spectroplast’s case, the startup uses silicon for their printing technique, and they hope that the use of silicon would trigger the development of even flexible use of the material, calling for application on the medicine and robotics field, as well as others.
Since Silicon is not quite bio-reactive and can be altered or converted to any shape while preserving still its strength and flexibility, the element is then chosen to do the job. Usually, it would involve injection molding to create mass production of the same product. However, such a method would be rather unviable when clients requested distinct qualities for each product.
Take hearts for example. They have overall similar large size but would differ in details, so when someone has to get a valve replacement, he would probably want to consider receiving a valve that’s been adjusted for his shape size and not the standard one (off-the-shelf). As Manuel Schaffer of ETH Zürich and Spectroplast’s CEO said in a university news release, the shape of the valve used for replacement are usually circular, but they don’t 100% match to the aorta shape, because it would differ for each patient. These valves could either contain materials mixtures that are likely to be rejected by the body, though that isn’t always the case.
That’s where the 3D printing technique comes into play. With the help of digital modeling of the heart by precise MRI, a well-tailored valve will come to life in just a couple of hours.
In surgical application, silicon is known to have a role in breast augmentation. Spectroplast would work with women who have gone through mastectomies and wanted to get a breast prosthesis that fits with the other. Another possibility of silicon and the printing technology’s uses are, designing anything that would perfectly fit a person’s body part, like a custom hearing aid, the end of a prosthetic leg, or another form of reconstructive surgery. It could also be employed to robots and the industrial work, as one-off parts to the other.
Both Schaffner and Stefanov had been working on the startup under a grant from the ETH Pioneer Fellowship and a Swiss national innovation grant. As of now, ever since their spin-out, the startup is doing the printing independently, but in the next few years, it would be likely to sell printers or make necessary modification to the printers as to adapt the existing setups. With 200 established customers, Spectroplast is steadily growing their wings, while trying to improve the speed of their printed products in the process, with the founders working on shifts.
In regards to the product’s use as an implant, though the valves they have created had gone through some initial testing, there would be years to come before any of the said product gets a home in someone’s body because it would usually take a decade just for the testing alone.
So, in the meantime, the founders are working on “life-improving” rather than life-saving applications.
Source: Techcrunch.com
