A 3D-printed breast prosthesis won a healthcare application award for its “disruptive innovation” for women who have undergone a mastectomy. Hashtagtwo, a breast prosthesis provider in the Netherlands, and ARBURG, a 3D printing company headquartered in Germany, won the TCT Healthcare Application award for the Personal Fit Breast Prosthesis at the annual TCT Awards in June.
The TCT Awards celebrate outstanding innovations and applications of 3D printing and additive manufacturing technologies around the world. Launched in 2017, the awards honor the innovative hardware, software, materials, and post-processing technologies that have been developed over the past year.
Additively manufactured with the ARBURG freeformer, the prosthesis can be tailor-made to the patient, including shape, density, size, and color, and it’s made in certified medical product grades that are lightweight, breathable, and fully recyclable. The material used, medical grade Cawiton SEBS, is soft but strong enough for the thickness to be reduced so that the prosthesis does not feel too heavy.
A Hashtagtwo customer reported that the 3D-printed prosthesis is “naturally light and weightless as a shoulder pad in a blazer.”
The companies have worked together since Hashtagtwo founder Chris Reutelingsperger, PhD, bought a freeformer 200-3X eight years ago to try printing customized breast prostheses, refining the technology, the materials and designs.
“We are delighted to win the 2024 TCT Health Application award, sponsored by HP,” said Sander Reutelingsperger, CTO, Hashtagtwo. “It was our first entry in these awards, and we were up against several strong companies, so we were very pleasantly surprised to win…. We strongly believe it will change the market for external breast prostheses that has seen little change since 1970.”
The ARBURG freeformer 200-3X was chosen for its versatility and additive manufacturing process that enables production-line printing of soft materials.
“It can be individually adapted to use different qualified standard granulates which we use in a flexible way combining materials and color,” Sander Reutelingsperger said. “The freeformer’s unique ability to build pressure up to 800 bar can create hard/soft combinations, in our case up to Shore A 20 (hardness scale).”
