(music up) 3d printing is building up from the bottom, layer by layer, stacking our materials. it’s really a bottom-up and a left-to-right,and a forward-and-back kind of technology. it can make an experience happen; it can makesomething more than just an object.
3d printing companies in canada, our whole focus is on making 3d printing technologydo what can’t be done. build something small, build it really welland go put it out on the market. go test it. go ride it.
it can be education or it can be prototypingor it can be general exploration of ideas. it’s not the technology, it’s the ideasthat feed into them. that’s what matters. we’re going to try and build multimaterialsinto the desktop 3d printing space. you know, the ability to explore carbon-fibre,metal, wood, and to start to get a sense for people what they can start to make for thoseparticular applications. these are some of the earlier test printsthat we did on the silicone printer and we are always looking into combinations of materials, really trying to find the right combination of fabric and silicone.
so right of the bat, we had all this technicalfabric, and we found that fabrics with natural fibres in them, like hemp fabrics or somethingthat’s a cotton blend really grabs the silicone because of the micro-porosity of the fibresthat are inside of the fabric. so, i printed a channel of the silicone andthen bent the copper wire into it and printed a final pass over it so there is all of thiskind of hidden rigidity inside of the fabric that you can get out of it. (music up) and we’re essentially developing a new wearableair quality monitor. what this will do is allow people to detectthe levels of pollution that they are exposed to
as they go about their day, wherever theyare. and, then they can essentially change theiractivities and where they go and what they do with this additional data feed. and, this will be important for people withchronic lung disease, especially. the freedom of complexity that additive manufacturingor 3d printing allows for iterative space or the iterative design process is reallyincredible. and, it’s well matched and is an appropriatetechnology for that space. so what we are aiming to do is to allow ourcustomers to de-risk their assets going into clinical trials.
in other words, they feel more confident aboutthe response of the drug. as well as, allow the customer to test drugsthat they may not have otherwise been able to even test. so what we can do is use 3d printed humantissue models for developing new drugs and we’re trying to do is make more advancedmodels, that better replicate the human tissue physiology. aspect biosystems is unique from the technologyperspective. so we’ve taken a combination of micro-fluidicstechnology and combined that with 3d printing technology to make a completely new type of3d printer that we call lab on a printer.
we can perform certain laboratory functionswithin the print-head itself before the bio-ink is extruded.
as the technology advances further, we will get to the point where we can print off full organs. i think within 10-15 years, maybe even less, we’ll be seeing that kind of thing come out. i’m excited about when home printers getrobust enough to print a usable part. something i can put into my ski bindings to replace something or try something new, and go ski it.
