drvarun sqMedical 3D Printing & Bioprinting

Dr Varun Tyagi is a medical doctor who practices in India and writes about remarkable and historical landmarks throughout the medical world.  Dr Varun believes that 3D printing can help democratize medical care, making medical devices affordable and available to everyone on the planet.

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In recognition of the huge potential of bioactive 3D printing, Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center at Shreveport has recently been awarded a $40,000 grant/investment to open the first Shreveport, LA area medical 3D printing lab.

 

Currently working in a lab provided by the Biomedical Research Foundation, the new 3D printing lab will pave the way to new 3D printed drug therapies which will allow doctors to implant bioabsorbable and antibiotic alluding materials along with bone or other material, which negates the need for secondary surgery later to remove the antibiotic material.

“The way that Osteomyelitis or bone infection would currently be treated, you’d go ahead and you’d mix up a bone cement, which is kind of like mixing up Play-Doh, and you mix it up and put antibiotics in it… you end up where you can mold it into these beads or pellets that can be implanted into the bone site of the infection,” Dr. Weisman told KTBS. “Then what will end up happening is it will clear up the infection, and 6 weeks later they’ll have to go back in and remove these, whereas what we’re able to do as a new novel treatment is by being able to 3D print both a bioabsorbable and antibiotic alluding bead is we can go ahead and implant that, and 6 weeks later we don’t have to go any remove it from the body. So that reduces the morbidity of having another surgical procedure once the bone infection is cleared up.”