New paper in Nature - Printing with GRACE !

Time to change our viewpoint on how #3Dprinting and #bioprinting are performed! 

Our work on Generative, Adaptive and Context-Aware Volumetric Printing (GRACE) is now published in Nature

Link to the open access paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09436-7

We set out to change the workflow of #additivemanufacturing taking advantage of the power of #light. While usually printers build an object following a design fully pre-determined by the user, GRACE uses information about the printable materials to automatically design the printed part. The goal? Prints that conform to the content of the printable material. 

For example, when printing an hydrogel containing living organoids and cellular structures, the printer can precisely generate design to encapsulate the cells, or to provide them with vascular channels, for perfusion and improved cell viability. We first demonstrated GRACE with #volumetric #tomographic light-based 3D printing, which offers extremely fast printing times (seconds to build multi-centimeter objects).

GRACE has powerful applications also in automating multi-material 3D printing, building mechanical joints, and overprinting (printing onto existing, previously produced parts). Moreover, GRACE is equipped with a routine to correct for shadowing, light-blocking elements within the printing vat, thanks to which we demonstrated bioprinting across stent-like cages, and other structures made from opaque materials.

Check the paper out, it is available fully#openaccess for everybody to read. Please do remember to check out the Supplementary Files, a lot information is actually in there, including information on the components we used to build our low-cost lightsheet imager.

We envision this technology will be of major interest for everybody in the #bioprinting and#3Dprinting community. While extremely innovative, the work on GRACE is just the beginning, and many more ground breaking developments for the field of bioprinting are now opening up, starting from this first proof of concept! Exciting times ahead!

A big shout out to all the Levato lab team involved in this work: Gabriel Groessbacher Davide Ribezzi Alessia Longoni Marième Gueye Estee Grandidier  and all the colleagues from the #biofabrication and #volumetric additive manufacturing community.

Thanks to the funding and support to curiosity-driven research from the European Research Council (ERC) (VOLUME-BIO, 949806), which made possible for us to pursue this work, and thanks to NWO (Dutch Research Council) (Vidi 20387), and the Materials-Driven Regeneration Gravitation program.