3D Printing Is Building Itself Up

Reason checks in on the growing 3D printing industry:

The latest breakthrough:

For the first time ever, scientists have 3D printed a cancer tumor in order to study how to kill it.

Growing cancer cells in a laboratory is nothing new—it’s often how new drugs are tested before they hit clinical trials. But those cultures are grown on petri dishes, where they’re unable to become actual “tumors” and are instead simply sheets of 2D cells. That means that a drug might work on cancer cells in a lab, but once it’s tested on an actual tumor, the three dimensional structure of it can throw in some added kinks that makes it ineffective. Wei Sun of Drexel University saw that the 3D printing of living cells has improved enough to make printing of actual tumors a viable possibility.

In other 3D printing news, Staples is hoping to bring the technology to the general public:

The office supply retailer began offering 3D printing services in two stores on Thursday, one in New York and another in Los Angeles. Anyone can walk in and have Staples crank out a tchotchke—or 1,000 of them—while reveling in the glory of the 3D printing revolution without spending thousands on an actual printer. If the pilot takes off, Staples (SPLS) says it will expand 3D printing services to more stores.