IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

David Zopf straddles the line between scientist and doctor; as an affiliate professor at the University of Michigan, he conducts research at the intersection of biomedical engineering and 3D printing. And as a pediatric surgeon there, he works with children born with malformations of the head and neck.

In 2019, a 9-year-old boy with cerebral palsy -- a group of disorders that affect movement and posture -- came to his practice. His breathing was extremely labored, and his parents had tried and failed to alleviate the issue with other specialists. "These children will work really hard for every breath," Zopf says. "It's almost like they're snoring when they're awake."

The boy lacked the muscle tone to keep his upper airway from spontaneously collapsing; every inhalation was a struggle between his lungs and throat muscles. What he needed was a simple device to prop the airway open, so Zopf took careful measurements and then drew up a design for a 3D-printed device that would bypass the obstruction.

Days later, he implanted a prototype into the boy's throat. "There was immediate improvement," Zopf says. "His eyes got wider and I saw him smile. He took a deep breath of air -- that struggle for every breath was relieved."

3D printers have long been lauded for their "rapid prototyping" capability. Engineers can quickly produce one-off iterations of a device and tweak them as issues arise. In the medical space, the same qualities allow doctors to quickly produce devices that are customized to a patient's anatomy at a relatively low cost. Once a practitioner has access to a 3D printer, the marginal cost of producing a device is often no more than a few dollars.

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