NJIT is a Hub of Additive Manufacturing Innovation

High-tech hip and knee implants that not only return immobile people to walking, but to the tennis court. 3D printed models of patients’ anatomy that allow physicians to plan and practice complex operations in advance. Novel peptide-based hydrogels, also bioprinted, that are injected, self-reassemble in tissue spaces and deliver drugs and other small cargo over days and months. Looking ahead, but perhaps not too far, fully functional, human-scale tissues and organs that are capable of replacing failed organs.

These are some of the innovations in advanced manufacturing and 3D printing developed by NJIT biomedical researchers and engineering graduates in recent years. The portal to that world exists right here on campus in research laboratories, and off campus in internships with cutting-edge companies in the region.

At an Honors College webinar earlier this month, Robert Cohen ’83, ’84, ’87, president of Stryker's digital, robotics, and enabling technologies division and chair of NJIT’s Board of Trustees, gave students an insider’s view of state-of-the art advanced manufacturing and its dramatic role in improving lives. He began with the story of a patient who lost half a pelvis to cancer, but received a new one from Stryker.

“Ten years ago, that patient may have been bedridden or lost a leg, but two weeks after her surgery, she was walking. Two months later, she was walking without a cane or a walker and back to driving a car,” Cohen recounted, adding that there was “nothing better for engineers” than helping to transform and reinvigorate a life before them.

A biomedical engineer and entrepreneur, Cohen years ago envisioned the convergence of advanced materials, new fabrication methods and robotic-assisted surgery to maximize motion restoration. 

“With additive manufacturing, I can design anything I want. I’m not limited by conventional manufacturing processes at all,” he noted.

Stryker implants have porous metal exterior surfaces created by additive manufacturing. They are produced with a 3D printing process known as “direct metal laser sintering” in which a laser is programmed to consolidate titanium alloy powder in a configuration that engineers create with a computer model. The resulting structure is fully solid internally with an external surface porous matrix for new bone to grow into. A growing database of 3D computer models of joint bone images enhances implant design considerably, and also serves as a guide to determine where an implant can better fit a person’s anatomy, while restoring the joint’s motion. 

Joined at the colloquium by three NJIT biomedical engineers, Vivek Kumar, Saikat Pal and Murat Guvendiren, Cohen said he was eager to work closely with university partners, whose students and faculty test out new equipment and procedures with the speed and freedom that academia allows. “Schools can do transformative things at a fast pace,” he said. The professors, in turn, described their working partnerships with clinicians who are advancing healthcare in a number of fields aided by engineering design.

Cohen noted that Stryker employs 120 NJIT graduates in its Mahwah facility alone. He invited students to come take tours. But he also counseled them as they developed their career plans to think about solving problems first and the means to do it after.

“Don’t just say how much you like 3D printing. Show us you did a capstone project that took a real clinical issue for which you innovated in order to solve a problem,” he said. “3D printing is itself nothing. It’s everyone who is going to use it to their advantage that matters.”

The faculty panelists offered advice to students as well.

Pal, who develops pre-surgery models, among other biomedical technologies, advised students at the webinar to “figure out what your innate curiosity is” and to come “be a fly on the wall” in research hubs such as his Computational Orthopaedics and Rehabilitation Engineering Laboratory.

Kumar, director of the Biomaterial Drug Development, Discovery and Delivery Laboratory, told them to seek out inspiration and mentors off campus as well. “Go on LinkedIn, do research and speak to as many people as you can. Go out there and get more information.”

And Guvendiren, director of the Instructive Biomaterials and Additive Manufacturing Laboratory, urged them to “not wait until your senior year – get into a lab as soon as possible.”