If everything goes right, I’ll have a nice Homo naledi mandible in a few hours.
Check it out, we got some alveolar bone laid down!
We got molars!
Incisors!
Done with printing!
It needs some touch ups, and there was definitely a frame shift mutation (a couple tooth tips are misplaced, because my filament snapped and a layer got skipped), but it’s nothing I can’t fix with a scalpel and some acetone.
Gonna run another one overnight, see how that goes!
This is the coolest thing. I was so confused by the first image but then 3D mandible!
(Imagine in the future when we have fgured out the material science of bone properly and can some how replicate those complex chemical bonds and biological structures and can actually print new bones for people! It’s my sci-fi heaven)
It’s not in human trials yet, but Northwestern’s developed this scaffold out of hydroxyapatite that they’re calling hyperelastic bone. It can be cut, rolled, folded, and pressed into areas missing bone material without glue or stitches- and in the rodent trials, they’ve seen blood vessel formation and the regeneration of natural bone over/around the scaffold.
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