Naomi Nathan describes her path into the additive manufacturing (AM) industry as taking the “long route”. But perhaps that’s the most useful route to take.
There’s often a chasm described between the potential for AM technologies and the solutions that potential end-users are searching for. For the healthcare sector, where Nathan has spent her career as a trained medical doctor and public health systems and policy specialist, bridging that gap with knowledge from both sides has the highest stakes – and arguably the most to gain.
Boosting AM
During a conversation with TCT, Nathan remembers stepping into the Berlin offices of Mobility | Medical goes Additive e.V. (MGA), where she has been leading its Medical division since last year, and seeing first-hand, real applications like customised prosthetics and implants and immediately concluding, “We need to get this out into the health systems.”
That, in essence, is what MGA is all about.
Naomi Nathan, MGA
MGA was established by Deutsche Bahn (DB) back in 2016 to cultivate a network of users, machine manufacturers and researchers to come together and deliver greater knowledge transfer for 3D printing in transport, a sector DB has been deploying AM for some time in everything from spare parts supply to brail signage. Its MGA Medical arm, founded in 2019, is built on the same principles – peer learning, sharing best practices, fostering AM in industry – but for the healthcare sector, an incredibly complex system with multiple stakeholders at play.
What MGA Medical is aiming to do, Nathan says, is “boost AM” by bringing those different stakeholders together to not only understand what additive is capable of but to see where it can add value to healthcare - from a user perspective.
“MGA Medical is trying to knock on the doors of healthcare,” Nathan said. “We are bringing value to the healthcare system, and together we can strengthen medical and healthcare applications.”
Nathan recalls the surprise role reversal of entering an industry that appeared to be making technologies first and then going out in search of an application, the opposite she had experienced in the health system where the established model is to carry out a needs assessment first and then come up with a solution.
“This approach has to change,” Nathan said. “This is what we’re trying to do with the organisation – bringing innovation closer to the user.”
To change that approach, MGA Medical has created six working groups, each focused on a different strand of the medical gamut: approval, pharmaceuticals, veterinary medicine, hospitals, use cases and materials. Within that, there are focus groups that drill deeper into emerging challenges and opportunities, including med-tech, orthotics and prosthetics, dental applications, and materials analyses and processing. MGA’s membership, which has grown to over 140 organisations, with more than 50 affiliated with Medical, is diverse. It includes stakeholders from university hospitals like University Hospital Münster and the Medical Advanced Manufacturing research group (SwissMAM) at the University Hospital Basel; additive OEMs like Stratasys and EOS; pharmaceutical companies like Takeda; regulatory notified bodies and quality assurance providers like Tüv Süd and ZEISS; research institutes such as the Fraunhofers and University of Derby; alongside AM software providers, consultants, start-ups, and strategic partners.
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“It’s putting credibility to the work by using experts and saying, okay, ‘we can collaborate, we add value, define the standards and processes and we can share among each other’,” Nathan said.
Working together
The challenge of pushing AM into a business is not easily won, and a hospital is perhaps the perfect microcosm of that, with several layers of acceptance that must be met. It’s not enough to have just one AM champion. In a hospital, which MGA Medical considers to be one of the biggest and most important players in its adoption push, you must convince physicians, nurses, technicians, the administrations and get buy in from legal and finance.It’s multifaceted. It requires change management, training, standards development, and optimisation of new materials, tools and techniques, which, as these working groups aim to address, will help to increase the awareness and application of AM in clinical settings.
“We need the community to make our applications well and also bring value to the health systems because health systems are moving into personalised care,” Nathan explained. “And this is what 3D printing offers. This is the value we give. We should knock on their doors, find those willing to try and become our champions.”
To accelerate this information exchange, MGA Medical introduced the European Healthcare Forum for Additive Manufacturing (EHFAM), an in-person conference, co-organised with the Symposium on 3D Printing for Life Sciences - 3DP Basel, which brings together researchers, policymakers, industry leaders, and healthcare professionals to drive the integration of AM into health systems. Nathan believes, “We cannot promote and raise awareness enough”, and the next forum, which takes place on on 26th-27th June in Basel, will invite discussion on practical applications, policy insights, real-world implementation and challenges, and take the conversation directly to industry.
“We can always stay and talk to ourselves, but we really need to put ourselves out there,” Nathan said of taking a practical approach. “My mindset is that we need to find those three, four or so applications that are really working and just keep promoting that before going into 10,000 things.”
Challenging expectations
There are universal challenges to implementing AM into an industry – from design considerations to changing established supply chains – but healthcare comes with its own unique hurdles, particularly around quality regulations and reimbursement. Nathan believes the best way to tackle that is with evidence: real credible data that shows how the technology is impacting patient health, and MGA Medical is actively working with groups and strategic partners to break down existing silos and encourage that exchange.
“Healthcare has been a very traditional field,” Nathan said. “I still face those challenges, particularly in med-tech and pharmaceuticals, where people don’t want to share. But I’m seeing some change in that mindset because we are living in a different time, the world is changing, people are realising we need to collaborate with action.”
As Nathan phrases it, ‘collaboraction’ is the through line. To date, the MGA network has hosted over 70 meetings with its members, but there is always room to work more closely and share. After celebrating its five-year anniversary last year, MGA Medical kicked off 2025 with its first MGA Medical Strategic Commitee meeting, which brought together different perspectives from across the clinical value chain to shape the next five years of its work and further strengthen its position at the convergence of AM in healthcare.
“This is what keeps me motivated, thatI am able to bring the right people at the right time to talk about the right issues and maybe the right solutions towards helping people’s lives,” Nathan concluded. “This has been the core.When you look at my career trajectory, it’s always been healthcare, it’s always been something to do with impacting people’s lives. That makes me happy, that I’m sure one day we [can] all sit together and say yes, people have access to the right care, customised care for personalised care and they’re doing better.”
This article originally appeared inside TCT Europe Edition Vol. 33 Issue 2. Subscribe here to receive your FREE print copy of TCT Magazine, delivered to your door six times a year.
