A report in Michigan’s weekly Grand Rapids Business Journal reveals that a local university and a local medical-device company are working together to investigate how using 3-D printing technology can address cost and time barriers when it comes to bringing medical devices to market.

A $500,000 grant from the Grand Rapids SmartZone Local Development Finance Authority will fund a 2.5-year collaboration between Grand Rapids-based MediSurge and the Applied Medical Device Institute (AMDI) (www.gvsu.edu/amdi), which is part of Grand Valley State University.

These organisations will determine the potential impact of using 3-D printing technology from Carbon (based in Redwood City, California), to create medical-device components at production volumes, with the aim of “accelerating final device manufacturing and development”.

AMDI executive director Brent Nowak said: “The technology will soon be the new standard, and the study will help create course content for GVSU’s curriculum.

We are on the cusp of revolutionising the medical-device manufacturing industry; that will not only grow and retain talent here in West Michigan but also attract new talent from outside the region.”

The partners said that the toxicity of the materials historically used has made the 3-D printing of polymer-based medical-device components impossible, but Carbon’s technology uses nine non-toxic families of materials, adding that both the cost and the amount of time needed to develop polymer-based medical devices are growing rapidly, with increased regulations, steel tooling and design validation requirements.

The Carbon 3-D printer technology has been installed in AMDI’s ‘incubator space’, a lab for health-care and medical-device start-ups located in GVSU’s Cook-DeVos Center for Health Sciences.

Five other universities on the east and west US coasts are using Carbon 3-D printing technology.