You can fashion almost anything on a 3D printer these days, from the most intricate airplane parts to near-perfect replicas of the human skull. But back in 2007, few had printed an object that could be implanted into someone else’s body.
That is, until an Italian surgeon named Dr. Guido Grappiolo found a patient who needed a hip replacement. When the patient first came to him a decade ago, she had advanced arthritis and a titanium hip cup that doctors had already implanted with screws.
Grappiolo, of Fondazione Livio Sciutto ONLUS in Savona, Italy, joined forces with orthopedic implant maker LimaCorporate and Arcam, a manufacturer of 3D printers that is now part of GE Additive, for what would be a landmark operation. With their help, he implanted the world’s first 3D-printed hip cup, the Delta-TT Cup. The TT stands for “Trabecular Titanium” a biomaterial “characterized by a regular, three-dimensional, hexagonal cell structure that imitates trabecular bone morphology,” according to LimaCorporate.
A few months after the operation, Grappiolo looked at a CT scan of the patient and saw that her bone tissue had already started to grow into the 3D-printed hexagonal cells of the implant. “From a technical point of view, we immediately got a good feeling of stability,” he said in a recent video interview, when asked to recall how the surgery went.
Grappiolo, who caught up with his female patient from 10 years ago to record the video, asked her to bend her leg back toward her chest. Then, he helped her rotate it. “The first patient is doing extremely well,” he said in the video.
Top and above: “Trabecular Titanium” is a biomaterial “characterized by a regular, three-dimensional, hexagonal cell structure that imitates trabecular bone morphology,” according to LimaCorporate. Images credit: LimaCorporate.
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