Nottingham team to bring additive manufacturing into medtech

The team will use the £6m grant to develop a toolkit for 3D printing that will act as an instruction manual to improve the pathway from research through to development and clinical adoption.

A need for personalised, tailored and effective medtech devices has been identified, but the materials have not been available, product development is arduous and the route to market is long.

Now, Nottingham’s Centre for Additive Manufacturing is addressing this problem by helping to unlock a bottleneck that prevents new innovative engineering entering the NHS. 

Ricky Wildman, Professor in Chemical Engineering at Nottingham University said: “One clear bottleneck in realising medtech innovation - particularly innovation involving additive manufacturing - is that material choices are limited. Expanding our palette is challenging because we don’t have great tools to predict the performance of materials yet, including whether a material is ‘3D printable’. For medtech, we have the extra complication of needing a full understanding in order to meet regulations.”