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3D Printed Pharma Firm Craft Health Receives $1M from Investors, Including Jenny Chen - 3DPrint.com
Craft Health’s tailored drug technology just received a boost. The Singapore 3D printed pharmaceuticals manufacturer announced it has raised S$1.42 million ($1.03 million) in its latest Pre-Series A. The funds will propel Craft Health’s 3D printing platform as it prepares for South-East Asia’s first clinical trial on 3D printed pharmaceuticals. Also in the works are various 3D printed nutrition and supplementation initiatives with several nutraceutical companies.
Led by Tokyo-based venture capital (VC) firm Mistletoe, the round also had participation from Kyoto medical equipment manufacturer Arkray’s corporate venture arm Arkray 4U; neuroradiologist and founder of 3DHeals, Jenny Chen; and angel investor Chang-Hung Tseng. This new cash infusion brings the total raised by Craft Health to date to S$2.4 million ($1.7 million).
From Deep Tech to 3D Printed Pills
Originally a deep tech startup from the inaugural batch of the National University of Singapore (NUS)’s Graduate Research Innovation Programme (GRIP), Craft Health was founded by pharmacists Wei Jian Goh and Lim Seng Han in 2019. According to NUS, the graduate students had identified a recurring patient problem at hospitals, mainly that they took home bags of medicines with often complicated medication regimes. Instead, combining several medications into a single polypill could help patients, be much more cost-effective and ensure it delivers all the proper medication at the right time in the correct dose. Attempting to solve this problem led the duo to develop a 3D printing solution during their penultimate year of graduate studies to manage patients’ daily medicines.
Craft Health’s CraftMake printer to make polypill pharmaceuticals. Image courtesy of Craft Health.
Driven by the need to simplify drug delivery is core to what Craft Health wants to achieve. The company considers that patients typically face high pill burdens, especially with today’s greying demographics worldwide. This issue of high pill burden is well positioned to be mitigated through 3D printed technology, and here Craft Health is taking advantage of 3D printing technology to create its polypills.
Capable of making multiple supplements or medicines in a single pill, Craft Health states that the result is an on-demand supplement developed for varied controlled release. These include immediate, delayed or enteric, and sustained release and orally disintegrating tablet formulations. For this to happen, the required active ingredient is mixed with the formulation with the desired controlled release profile before 3D printing.
CraftMake after printing polypills. Image courtesy of Craft Health.
The company began by marketing its 3D printing platform to distributors and pharmaceutical companies so they could personalize nutrition and medicine. Today it utilizes its own 3D printing platform with its proprietary CraftMake 3D printer, CraftControl 3D printing software, and even 3D printable materials with controlled release profiles, known as CraftBlends. The trio of products allows multiple active ingredients to be combined into a polypill, reformulate active ingredients into different controlled release profiles and form factors, and design and formulate new 3D printed products.
Building a Pill 3D Printing Startup
Nestled at NUS Enterprise at the Singapore Science Park, Craft Health was incubated in a startup environment which has led company founders to exchange ideas with other startups, and under the NUS ToughLove program, they gained access to the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Studio, where they have received invaluable engineering help from Master Engineer Richard Chee.
In just two years, Craft Health managed to gain plenty of attention, particularly in Asia, where it won second place at the inaugural National Additive Manufacturing Innovation Cluster (NAMIC) startup forum in 2019 before presenting its technology to Senior Minister and Coordinating Minister for National Security Teo Chee Hean at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) innovation center.
Commenting on the latest funding round, Atsushi Taira, the managing director of Mistletoe Singapore, said, “Craft Health has been striving to provide transformational innovations for oral medication and supplements. At first glance, it may be seen as just printing pills with 3D printers, but what sets them apart is the personalized formulations and novel controlled release technologies for various active ingredients. Craft Health would transform the industry fundamentally into informatics, demand-driven manufacturing, and lean supply chains. I am so thrilled about the future of Craft Health and the potential industry transformation.”
With medical 3D printing expert Jenny Chen also investing in the firm, her participation will likely draw much attention from the bioprinting industry to Craft Health, especially since Chen has one of the largest 3D printing networks and is globally active through her organization, bringing people together from various branches of healthcare to learn from each other and innovate in 3D printing and bioprinting.
Like its other investors, Chen’s input will be extremely valuable for a company set on relieving the burden of pills for patients.
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Tagged with: 3d print funding • 3D printed healthcare solutions • 3D printed pharmaceuticals • 3D printing pharmaceuticals • Craft Health • CraftMake 3d printer • Extrusion-Based 3D Printing of Pharmaceuticals • funding round • Jenny Chen • National University of Singapore • pharmaceutical 3D printing • pharmaceutical industry • polypills • pre-series A round • singapore
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Fine lines: LACE founder Jenny Wu on using 3D printing to produce fine jewellery
In the corridors of Art Basel Miami, visitors are rushing to see a bold piece they’ve never seen before, wanting to know more about it, wanting to touch it, maybe even wanting to buy it.
Taken aback by the interest, Jenny Wu returned to her Oyler Wu Collaborative architecture design studio with the idea to start a new business. Seven years on, her LACE jewellery brand has launched a wedding collection, a men’s line, and recently expanded into Europe. Underpinning all that success is 3D printing technology.
It was the autumn of 2014 when Wu’s first LACE line of jewellery was launched, just a year after she first used 3D printing to make a fashion statement while speaking publicly and attending events. Among the first products on sale were the Tangens necklace, which features interlocking elements and was initially produced with Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM) technology, and the Papilio ring, a design inspired by the movement of a butterfly wing that has been additively manufactured in nylon and metal materials, while also cast in sterling silver.
Each of these designs began with a sketch, before moving into an extensive prototyping phase that first assessed form and fit and later considered the best material for production.
The process used for production, though, has been subject to much deliberation over the years, for not every step of Wu’s journey with LACE has been a walk in the park. “For the first few years, there was definitely a lot of learning,” she tells TCT. Case in point is the Tangens necklace, one of LACE’s flagship products and the kind of piece that was drawing the attention of so many in Miami. While the design remains much the same as it did back in 2014, the production method needed changing.
“Back then, it was mostly FDM and to print a lot of my jewellery was challenging, there was a lot of limitations for the kind of work I wanted to do and how it might translate to 3D printing,” Wu says. “With the support systems, FDM was impossible, so now I mostly work with SLS [Selective Laser Sintering], which, being powder based, obviously makes it more feasible to do interlocking pieces, [for example].”
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LACE
3D printed Tangens necklace.
Finding the right process to produce this piece was paramount for Wu since she had insisted on the necklace being completely 3D printed, including the latch, with zero assembly. Since the necklace was a big and bold piece, it needed to be flexible and durable, but not so hard that it would hurt upon contact with the skin.
“Figuring out how to print the necklace was probably one of the most challenging things,” she recalls. “Just the latch itself, I probably printed that latch 50 times because when it’s too tight, the customer will yank on it and the whole thing will pull off, and then if it’s too loose, someone knocks you and it falls off, and so, in the end, we figured out using SLS with a TPU was the best method, but even within that, looking at the tolerance of each intricate [interlocking] piece and trying to make sure they move but don’t collide, that was a lot of work.”
A lot of effort, as well, has gone into finding the right material to use for pieces, especially as the additive manufacturing industry has made great strides in expanding users’ options in that regard over the years.
Some materials have been too soft and easily breakable, others too stiff for the specific application.
It has led Wu to look beyond polymers and closer at what metal 3D printing can offer, resulting in many new designs that polymer AM couldn’t address, such as the Mobius ring, while offering metal versions of several existing designs that had previously been released as plastic pieces, like the Papilio ring. Per Wu, most of what LACE now offers is done in precious metals and steels, largely for reasons around durability and wearability – considering how a customer might bang their ring on a table or not feel when their earrings have fallen out because they’re too lightweight – but also because, “I was always interested in elevating 3D printed jewellery into a fine jewellery brand and not a fashion jewellery brand.”
The latest LACE piece is the limited-edition Velum ring, released in 2020 with only 35 units going into production. It came after many months of design and prototyping using a resin 3D printer, making adjustments ‘slowly and constantly’ before eventually printing a final iteration in precious metal.
Velum, as with all LACE products, is produced on-demand and is available in stainless steel, bronze and grey steel, which are 3D printed, or cast in silver after the piece has been printed in wax.
Velum is said to have taken LACE into a new direction with regards design and the inspiration behind this piece tells you it could barely be possible without 3D printing.
“Sometimes I think about the work we do in architecture leading the way, inspiring the work in the jewellery, but Velum is one that is happening at the same time as what we’re doing in architecture,” Wu explains. “We’ve been really inspired by taking a soft, draped surface, but then producing it in a hard material; trying to get the undulations and the reading of fabric, but hard. We’ve been interested in that type of design for some time. We won a competition for this drapery inspired canopy for a museum, and at the same time, I was working on this Velum piece. It’s nice to have things that are working at different scales and, obviously, with the soft surface and curves, 3D printing is just completely suited for that type of application.
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Though Wu has been working as a jewellery designer for seven years now, she has never seen it as a departure from architecture. Rather, she considers it architecture at a smaller scale that is placed on the body. While the Oyler Wu Collaborative endeavour sees the implementation of additive to produce scale models, LACE has enabled her to explore the full potential of the technology with greater freedom. It has also allowed her to do so in a manner that matches her values, that considers the wants of her customer base at an intimate level and allows her to bring to market something unique in style and design.
Each LACE piece begins on a sketch pad, is modelled digitally and printed repeatedly until the design is finalised, before production is outsourced. A workflow typical of many a jeweller. But it is done Jenny Wu’s way.
“For me, 3D printing has completely changed the way a business model is run, especially in fashion and jewellery,” Wu finishes. “There was a point when you consider, ‘should I just have this [mass] produced somewhere and instead of printing it in small batches,’ and in six years of building this company, I found that I was able to evolve my design over time, I was able to hold small inventory, and I’m able to print to order and be nimble about when I can launch a piece.
“When I talk to more traditional brands, just making a mould for a piece of jewellery costs a lot of money and then the time between conception and production could run between one to two years. You’re making a huge investment and you’re expected to order 100,000 pieces otherwise you can’t recover the cost of R&D. You just think about all that fast fashion out there, and the fact we have sweatshops and they’re just pumping out massive amounts of [products] that people may or may not want, and then you have this huge sell out at the end, it just feels like this is not the right business model to work in this time and age. Obviously, our cost per piece will be higher than if it was mass-produced, but I feel like this is the more sustainable and ethical way of practicing.”
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Key 3D Printing Patent Expiration
The start of this year could mark a new milestone in the 3D printing revolution as one of the key 3D printing technology patents related to Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) expires.
). The owner of the patent in question is Carl R. Deckard, who registered an application for this patent on May 31, 1994, and received it on January 28, 1997.
Most US patents expire after 20 years, but there is an exception to this rule that applies to patents issued prior to June 8, 1995. (Deckard's patent no. US5597589 is included in this exception). The duration of patent applications filed before this date is longer than one of the following two options: either 17 years from the date of issue of the application, or 20 years from the earliest date of registration of the application.
Carl R. Deckard Patent No. US5597589, is a continuation or divisional application of prior patents filed up to 1995, namely: patent No. US5376580 registered July 10, 1992, No. US5132143 - June 21, 1990, and No. US4863538 - October 17, 1986.
So, in this case, the shortest period of validity is 20 years from the earliest date of registration of the main patent, let's say that the application for the main patent was registered on October 17, 1986, then such a patent would expire on October 17, 2006.
A longer patent term would be 17 years from the date of issue of the patent on January 28, 1997, and it expired the other day, or rather on January 28, 2014!
This date would coincide with the date predicted by Duanne Scott, Design Promotion Specialist at Shapeways. He said that SLS technology will become available in February this year.
So get ready folks, the 3D printing revolution is coming.
SLS is a low cost, high resolution 3D printing technology, hence its revolutionary potential.
The following is a description of Deckard's patent for "Apparatus for the production of parts by selective sintering":
"Apparatus for selective sintering of a layer of powder for the production of a part made from a plurality of sintered layers. The device consists of a computer that controls the laser and directs the laser energy onto the powder to create a sintered mass. The computer either determines or is programmed in such a way that the limits of the boundaries of the desired cross-sections of the part area are set.
At each cross section, the laser beam scans the powder layer, then proceeds to sinter it within the cross section. Next, the powder is applied, and the layers are sequentially baked until the part is completely formed. Desirably, the powder dispenser includes a drum that moves horizontally across the target area of the part and rotates in the reverse direction to smooth and distribute the powder in an even layer over the entire target area. The downflow system provides temperature control of the air flow through the target area to create an average powder temperature during the sintering process.
Regarding the consequences of patent expiration, whether they come immediately or more gradually, people differ on this, but one thing is already clear that as soon as certain barriers to intellectual property are removed, this leads to increased competition and lower prices for consumers .
This has already happened with a 3D printing technology called Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM).
After the FDM patent expired, sales of these printers skyrocketed, and their price dropped from a few thousand dollars to $300, given the fact that many of these low-cost 3D printers were made in China.
2014 will be an important year for the development of 3D printing. Another patent expires this year:
"Simultaneous Multilayer Vulcanization in Stereolithography"
Application Date: April 25, 1994.
Date of issue of the patent: January 28, 1997
Expiration date April 25, 2014
US Patent No. US5597520
Two other patents, US6007318 and US5554336 expire in 2015 and 2016. respectively.
"Method and device for the production of three-dimensional objects using stereolithography"
Application registration date: June 5, 1995
Date of issue of the patent: September 10, 1996
Expiration date June 5, 2015
US Patent No. US5554336
Owner: 3D Systems
"Method and Apparatus for Prototyping 3D Objects"
Application Date: December 20, 1996
Date of issue of the patent: December 28, 1996
Expiration date December 20, 2016
US Patent No.
US6007318
Owner: Z Corp
Other patents expiring this year include 3 3D Systems patents (all patents include the SLS method) and 6 patents from Z Corp. Stratasys" including FDM, support material removal and optimization. The technology described in these patents promises to be an incredible breakthrough in the development of 3D printing technology.
Thus, in 2014. – and perhaps even today – we can start compiling a historical chronicle of 3D printing.
Thanks to Jenny Caret dash Caret for providing this patent information.
Article prepared for 3dtoday.ru
3D printed jewelry as a Hollywood trend
3D printing has long been used as an auxiliary technique in architecture or design. And finally, a small revolution happened: 3D-printed products, including jewelry, became an independent phenomenon. And - began to rapidly become fashionable. At least, this is what happens in the West - and perhaps at some point this trend will come to us.
Refinery29, an independent American fashion and style portal, published an interview with the founder of the LACE jewelry brand, Jenny Wu, a designer who introduced spectacular 3D jewelry into fashion, which caused a noticeable interest in this technology. We share with you the materials of this article.
Today, everyone can purchase designer works printed on a 3D printer. And it all happened, in large part thanks to one particular initiator - the founder of the Los Angeles company for 3D printing jewelry Jenny Wu.
Jenny Wu moved to the jewelry industry from architecture, where she first got to know 3D printing techniques. In 2004, she co-founded Oyler Wu Collaborative , an architecture firm known for its impressive projects such as Hollywood's Culinary Lab, or the Cube, a four-story steel and rope installation displayed outside the Olympic Stadium at the Beijing Biennale. -2013".
Now Jenny Wu manages to do architectural projects and - her jewelry company LACE , which produces surreal and futuristic necklaces and rings.
And her jewelry has already conquered the sphere of contemporary art. They can be seen both on Hollywood stars (Carrie Underwood and Ingrid Nielsen) and at various festivals (for example, Burning Man).
Prices for LACE products range from $50 to $1200, and the jewelry itself is made in a wide variety of materials, including atypical ones for jewelry: nylon, stainless steel, and of course traditional premium materials, silver and rose gold.
Jenny Wu
What is 3D printing? How is this technique used to create jewelry?
3D printing is a manufacturing process based on the principle of “adding”. A 3D printer “grows” a piece of jewelry by applying layer upon layer of a powdered material such as nylon, metal or wax. As soon as the next layer of material is “printed”, it is covered with a reinforcing agent that binds the layers together. After the last layer has been printed and the product has reached its final shape, a special cleaning program is started, which removes excess powder and material overlaps not planned by the design.
What does the whole process look like?
My product design process starts with sketching by hand. Then my colleagues help visualize the drawing in a 3D computer model. We are making several variants of decoration, trying to see how this design will look in all three planes, and how the decoration will “sit down” on a person.
Once our digital jewelry model is ready and we are satisfied, we start printing a prototype of the jewelry on our own 3D printer in our office (FDM - Fused Deposition Modeling is the most popular 3D printer that everyone can buy for themselves today) . Prototyping is the most cost effective and fastest way to test how a particular design will look and wear.
Once we are completely satisfied with the design, we send the file to a 3D printing service bureau, where the final product is produced.
Can a 3D printed jewelry be worn right away?
There is a misconception that a piece of jewelry that has just come out of print is immediately ready to be shipped to the customer.
In fact, there are additional processes, for example, grinding, painting, and so on - different ways to bring the product to its perfect form.
How did you get started in 3D printing jewelry? Is this a difficult thing?
I first started using a 3D printer while at Harvard to create architectural models. However, I only started experimenting with printing other objects, such as the design of things and jewelry, about five years ago.
The hardest part of the whole 3D printing process is getting my sketches right into a 3D digital model on the computer. We use the most advanced 3D modeling software commonly used for animation (cartoon production and similar).
How did you decide to start the LACE jewelry brand?
A couple of years ago I got the idea to create a necklace with a high collar. And I remembered my architectural background and experience with a 3D printer, thinking - why not apply it and see how this form will look on me?
As a result, I printed this necklace for myself and went to the exhibition-show dedicated to contemporary art - Miami Art Basel.
And there, at parties, everyone suddenly started to stop me and ask - where did I buy it, and who is the author of the necklace? After such a rush of attention to jewelry, one could only ask oneself the question: why not start a company producing such things?
I spent the next year figuring out how to make 3D printed things to wear on the body and how I could turn it into a business—which eventually resulted in the founding of LACE.
What is the fundamental difference between 3D printed jewelry and traditional ones? What is their advantage?
3D printing essentially "speeds up" the manufacturing process. For example, my chain necklaces are made from woven links. And instead of making each link separately, then fastening, welding, or fixing the smallest parts together, I just get the whole chain as a whole - as a single product, at one time.
Another advantage is that it's more like a business plan. The fact is that the cost of production using 3D printing of one (conditionally) ring is exactly the same as the cost of printing hundreds of rings.
And because it's so easy to take and print as much as you need, when you need it, there's no need to stock up.
Finally, 3D printing offers great customization options. I can make each copy to order, and deliver it within 2-3 weeks.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to start their own 3D project?
3D printing is a great way for design enthusiasts and professionals alike to test your ideas. Technology is becoming more and more accessible. For example, there are now many basic 3D software options available, such as Google SketchUp, that you can quickly learn with little or no modeling experience.
Even if you don't have your own equipment, you can simply send your designs to 3D printing services (in America, for example, Shapeways and Sculpteo), and print your product at an affordable price.
Note JEWELERY:
In addition to LACE, the American technological jewelry brand Nervous System, which was founded in 2007 by two graduates of Massachusetts MIT, specialists in architecture, biology and mathematics, is also known all over the world.
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