Lithoz Offers Improved Ceramic Material for 3D-Printed Bone Replacements

Lithoz has developed the LithaBone HA 480, a substantially improved bioresorbable ceramic bone graft substitute. The company says the material was developed in intensive collaboration with users of previous Lithoz bone graft substitutes.

The 3D printed patient-individual parts made of hydroxyapatite are well suited for bone replacements in the medical and dental field. The company says substantial improvements include mechanical properties, higher wall thickness, possible geometries, size of the lattice structures and processability.

The development goal was to make the material more economically viable and the use of 3D printing for bone replacements even more effective. The company says the result is a greatly improved human bone-like ceramic material which can be used to create distinctly blue complex parts.

In medicine, ceramics are considered well suited materials for devices and implants due to their biocompatibility, low thermal conductivity and lighter intrinsic weight. Most importantly, however, certain ceramics can be resorbed by the body, eliminating the risks connected to second surgeries.

The wide range of bone structures in the body necessitate that ceramic materials for bone replacement fully cover this range and are both biocompatible and resorbable. The planned interaction of the bone substitute material with adjacent bone and tissues depends on the optimized design of geometries which, accordingly, determines clinical success as bone regrows along the material’s guide structures and the ceramic dissolves in the body.

LithaBone HA 480 offers several major improvements, including significantly higher wall thicknesses, which is  a key requirement for versatility reasons. With LithaBone HA 480, previous maximum wall thicknesses of <1.6mm (LithaBone HA 400) have been increased to 10 mm, while minimum wall thicknesses required have been reduced even further, which significantly broadens the range of applications.

The material also enables more precise imaging accuracy of fine structures — in line with the strengths of lithography-based ceramics manufacturing (LCM). One clear goal was to offer a higher level of ultraprecise resolutions and highly complex structures when working with hydroxyapatite. It is said LithaBone HA 480 shows strongly reduced overpolymerization with a simultaneously improved depth of cure, resulting in a simpler selection of build parameters and a significantly more stable manufacturing process.

The material also offers a 10-fold longer shelf life, which helps eliminate the previous obstacle of previous materials’ short shelf life that impacted the availability required for urgent surgical interventions. Parts are also significantly easier to clean, making up valuable time during often vital medical interventions. According to the company, experienced users have confirmed significantly faster and easier cleaning processes thanks to an improved binder composition.

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