Abstract
As the understanding of disease grows, so does the opportunity for personalization of therapies targeted to the needs of the individual. To bring about a step change in the personalization of medical devices it is shown that multi‐material inkjet‐based 3D printing can meet this demand by combining functional materials, voxelated manufacturing, and algorithmic design. In this paper composite structures designed with both controlled deformation and reduced biofilm formation are manufactured using two formulations that are deposited selectively and separately. The bacterial biofilm coverage of the resulting composites is reduced by up to 75% compared to commonly used silicone rubbers, without the need for incorporating bioactives. Meanwhile, the composites can be tuned to meet user defined mechanical performance with ±10% deviation. Device manufacture is coupled to finite element modelling and a genetic algorithm that takes the user‐specified mechanical deformation and computes the distribution of materials needed to meet this under given load constraints through a generative design process. Manufactured products are assessed against the mechanical and bacterial cell‐instructive specifications and illustrate how multifunctional personalization can be achieved using generative design driven multi‐material inkjet based 3D printing.
Highlights
Modern healthcare relies on medical devices, yet a large proportion of patients who receive one can suffer from infection or chronic inflammation that can require antibiotics and corrective surgery
We developed two inkjet printable biofilm resistant formulations and used a computational design approach to direct the manufacture of multi-material devices, specifying the deposition location of voxels with different moduli in order to achieve a customized mechanical deformation for a given load
Novel reactive ink formulations were developed and optimized for the MM-inkjet 3D printing (IJ3DP) process to produce structures with distinct mechanical performances while possessing resistance to bacterial biofilm formation on the basis of the previously allocated monomer candidate database[2] and consideration of molecule flexibility;[25] further detail is given in methodology and Supporting Information
Summary
Modern healthcare relies on medical devices, yet a large proportion of patients who receive one can suffer from infection or chronic inflammation that can require antibiotics and corrective surgery. It is becoming increasingly apparent that by selecting appropriate materials, the behavior of attached cells can be controlled, thereby providing a means to designed medical devices with reduced failure rates. Screening libraries of materials has been used to identify polymers with cell-instructive properties including controlling immune responses, resisting bacterial biofilm formation, promoting stem cell attachment, and the prevention of fungal colonization.[1,2,3,4,5] We aim to exploit the materials identified using this approach to achieve multi-functional medical device production, meeting both cell response requirements and mechanical performance criteria. Abdi School of Engineering and Sustainable Development De Montfort University Leicester LE1 9BH, UK
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