Whether Leuven or Michigan, medical or aerospace, for Materialise, collaboration is always the through line.
When I first visited the additive manufacturing software pioneer in 2015, it’s message – expressed through elaborate 3D printed lamps that blossomed like flowers alongside unique customised eyewear – was ‘co-creation’. A decade has passed but the theme continues, in its CO-AM cloud-based software platform and in the recently established Leading Minds consortium.
Over the last two months, the company has twice opened its doors to TCT Magazine; first at its North American metal AM production centre in Plymouth, MI, followed by its Belgian headquarters for a gathering of one of its most important user groups.
PLYMOUTH, MI
Light snow has begun to fall as I arrive at Materialise’s US facility, a 30-minute drive out from where the AM industry is preparing to gather in Detroit for this year’s RAPID+ TCT. Materialise has invited some of its customers to tour its metal 3D printing facility, marking 35 years since co-founders Fried Vancraen and Hilde Ingelaere set out to create a company that would help make a better and healthier world, and in the process, develop a software to make AM work better. Today, its flagship Magics product has 6,350 users.
“We're releasing Magics 2025, which is our bread and butter,” Bryan Crutchfield, Materialise North American Vice President and General Manager, tells me from his office. “Our new products are really focused on automation. How do we automate these workflows? How do we integrate AI, for instance, and use it to become more efficient? Look at the data lakes that are now going to be created with software systems, like our CO-AM, where you gather all of this data that's being created inside additive factories – well, now you need to act on it.”
From its origins as a service provider to operating multiple AM production sites, Materialise has a history of building solutions to solve its own challenges. When Vancraen installed Materialise’s first machine from 3D Systems in a corner of the Catholic University of Leuven in 1990, it was the impetus to start engineering a new software that would allow the company to print the parts it needed. When it later saw an opportunity to move into automotive tooling, requiring a build platform that could accommodate the size of an entire car bumper, it went ahead and created its own large-format stereolithography system, the Mammoth; The Mammoth later went on to print an actual woolly mammoth model for display at a museum in Belgium. In Plymouth, there is no Mammoth, but there is a large fleet of laser powder bed fusion machines building medical parts with that software as the backbone.
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Exhibit at the UK's definitive and most influential 3D printing and additive manufacturing event, TCT 3Sixty.
“I think we all speak the same language here. The hype period now is over and now it's down to who really has real applications and is going to scale them,” Crutchfield tells me. “What we see is those who have spent the time, done their due diligence and started to design for additive, now they're taking those applications to the next level and scaling.”
Materialise
Materialise claims to produce around 280,000 personalised 3D printed instruments and implants per year, 160,000 of which are for the US market. The US facility was opened in 2023 to drive faster response and reduced delivery times for personalised titanium cranio-maxillofacial (CMF) implants used for facial reconstructive surgery. Before that, all of its CMF products were printed in Belgium, but it’s now able to offer personalised care much closer to US patients. Crutchfield points to just some of the healthcare applications Materialise has had a hand over the last 35 years; the hearing aids in the late 1990s that cemented them as one of AM’s killer applications, to the first personalised hip and shoulder implants in the mid-2000s. But it’s not long until we get onto collaboration.
“[There’s] a little bit of squeeze now that's been applied to the industry because for 10 years there was so much going on, you didn't have to work super hard,” Crutchfield explains. “Well now that the squeeze is on just a little bit, it's forcing people to work together a lot more than it used to. And that's going to benefit the users at the end of the day. From our point of view, we've always been about open collaborations. We're pretty proud of the fact that we have a couple of hundred partners in our ecosystem and we couldn't do what we do without them. We really feel when people think about additive, they need to think about the ecosystem of additive.”
That ecosystem is on full display here. There’s dedicated software, material management, printing, post-processing and inspection stations that ensure each part leaves the facility finished and packaged to the highest quality. In addition to metals, there’s also rows of polymer systems producing medical models and guides, and next to them, a cluster of stackable yellow trays on the wall filled with printed parts – models, guides, implants – ready to be transferred to the next step of the process chain. I notice how almost every labelled tray is full, each little package representing a patient about to benefit from three decades of advancements to 3D modelling and printing, and hopefully, as Materialise’s founders envisioned all those years ago, live a better and healthier life.
LEUVEN, BELGIUM
There’s a colourful light stream refracting from the stained-glass window and onto the podium at Irish College where Jiten Parmar and Lisa Ferrie from Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust are presenting a case study on the use of 3D technologies in keyhole surgery for a complex head tumour removal. It’s an incredible story of ingenuity, technology, and of course, collaboration between surgeon and engineer. But it’s the human element that draws the room to such silence, you could hear a pin drop.
This is what Materialise means when it talks about meaningful applications – and AM value. By implementing these technologies, the patient recovered quickly and well, with minimal scarring, and the surgeon is now able to treat the next person on the list much faster due to the time and costs saved. As I learn at Materialise’s 3D Printing in Hospitals Forum, where surgeons, clinicians and engineers have congregated to share their stories of implementing 3D printed tools and building point of care labs, for many healthcare professionals today 3D technologies are just a part of their daily life.
Materialise
Here, 3D printing isn’t the focal point. In fact, it’s not in a lot of the case studies we hear throughout the day. Instead, there’s a shift happening. As Materialise broadens its medical modelling tools with mixed reality products that allow healthcare professionals to examine cases and prepare patient specific treatment in virtual environments, the need for physical 3D printed models, now a mature application, has declined. It’s not true for every case – in more complex surgeries, such as that in Leeds, surgeons will use every tool at their disposal – but it’s a practical reminder that 3D printing is just one part of the process; another tool in the toolbox.
Entering Materialise’s Belgian HQ the following day is like taking a trip through the 3D printing ages. A gallery of AM projects shows many of the areas the company has made its mark, from fashion and interiors to automotive with RapidFit. Its 3D printed lampshades accent every hallway of its labyrinthian facility, punctuated by safety doors that give the feeling of an astronaut striding through a gangway ahead of a rocket launch. We see a streamlined operation as we tour through labs kitted out with industrial machines and equipment; just one stop in another complete end-to-end workflow, from the engineers working on screens in offices to prepare patient cases, to the teams anodising printed parts in controlled environments.
The AM industry has been in a bit of a negative slump in recent years. Brigitte de Vet-Veithen saw this when she took over as CEO last year, describing her surprise at the level of negativity in a recent conversation with TCT. But there were pleasant surprises too, largely from its community of medical end users.
“I see so many commonalities with other industries and applications where I think we can learn a lot from what happened in the medical space to apply it there and accelerate that adoption,” de Vet-Veithen told TCT.
As I reflect on all I’ve seen from one of AM’s oldest companies over the last two months, I can’t help but take that beam of light that illuminated the stage a day earlier as a little symbol of where we should be looking to when pondering AM’s true impact; in the thousands of cases treated, and its future potential.
This article originally appeared inside TCT Europe Edition Vol. 33 Issue 3. Subscribe here to receive your FREE print copy of TCT Magazine, delivered to your door six times a year.
