Less than 40 years ago, in 1986, the U.S. patent office granted the first patent for 3D printing to Charles Hull. Hull founded 3D Systems Corp. that same year and introduced the first 3D printer, the SLA-1, in 1988. Moving ahead through the 90s and the early 2000’s, new 3d printing technologies came quickly. We wrote about 3D printing orthotics, replacement teeth, and prosthetic limbs early on in Health Tech Insider’s history. More recently, we’ve covered 3D bioprinting. Bioprinting involves printing using living cells, biochemicals, and supportive material, often biopolymer gels, that serve as scaffolding for 3D bioprinted structures. For example, we’ve written about bioprinting living skin complete with blood vessels, new bone in place in a patient’s body, and living brain tumors. Most 3D bioprinting developments we write about are in development with highly specialized materials and structures created for specific purposes.
That leads us to Brinter. Brinter is a Finnish bioprinting tech company. From their website: “Our vision is to improve worldwide health and save lives by advancing bioprinting technology and increasing its applicable uses.” Brinter recently introduced the Brinter Core, which the company describes as modular, portable, and half the cost of its earlier model. The Brinter Core advances bioprinting with its ability to 3D bioprint using “both stiff and soft materials, including but not limited to liquids and hydrogels with living cells, bio-paste, metal with binder material, and plastic while being easy to pack up and set up in a different lab or cleanroom in minutes.” The key to the Brinter Core’s adaptability is its patent-pending Automatic Dispensing Head Change Tool.
The Brinter Core prints from instructions in a CAD model, printing successive layers of mixed cells, nutrients, and supporting structural materials. Brinter currently sells the Brinter BioPrinter and nine special-purpose Bioprinter tool modules. The entry-level Brinter Core model can use the same modules as the earlier bioprinter.
The details of the Brinter Core are beyond the scope of this article or Health Tech Insider in general. However, the concept of bioprinting with hardware built with modularity by design holds great promise for faster development of specific bioprinting applications.
