Cheng Sun, PhDAssociate Professor of Mechanical EngineeringNorthwestern UniversityHost: Professor Hao Zhang

"Development of high-throughput precision 3D printing technologies towards patients-specific biomedical devices"

Advancements in healthcare have opened up the promising opportunities for personalized medicine to improve patient outcomes while decreasing costs. However, widespread adoption remains a major challenge due to the additional time and expense required to individualize treatments to patient-specific conditions. Three-dimensional (3D) printing is an emerging technology with the potential to fabricate personalized biomedical devices at low cost with extremely short lead-time. Recent achievements in the field have utilized 3D printing to manufacture arterial stents, airway tubes, bones, and dental prosthetics with relative large dimensions. However, there remains a knowledge gap for the high-throughput fabrication of biomedical device with fine feature size.

In this talk, I will present our recent development of a highly scalable 3D printing technology - continuous liquid interface production microstereolithography (mCLIP) with sub-10 mm fabrication precision. I will first introduce our recent work in fast 3D printing of completely customizable stents using the mCLIP process. Using the optimized process conditions, we have successfully fabricated 3D printed BVSs with radial stiffness comparable to nitinol stents and strut thickness of 150 mm, comparable to the commercially available bioresorbable vascular stents. A 20 mm-long stent was printed in less than 12 minutes. I will also discuss the process enabling direct 3D printing of optical lenses with nanometer-scale surface smoothness. Furthermore, the 3D printed lens has been used as the mold to fabricate a customized contact lens using oxygen permeable hydrogel materials.