Additive Talks | The path to clinical scale: What it really takes to deploy AM in healthcare

Imagine the following scenario:

A child arrives in the operating theatre. The surgical team has prepared for weeks. They have the imaging, the plan, the expertise. Sitting on a sterile tray, and made specifically for this patient is a 3D-printed anatomical model, a custom surgical guide, or a device that did not exist in any catalogue. Someone built it. Someone validated it. Someone made it safe enough to put in the hands of a surgeon operating on a child.

That “someone” is a biomedical engineer, a radiologist, a clinical team working inside a hospital with limited budgets, complex regulatory obligations, and no margin for error.
Additive manufacturing has been described as a revolution in healthcare for over a decade. The implants, the surgical models, the patient-specific devices are the proof of concept that made us believe the technology capabilities. What is in question is something harder and more important: can it scale? Not in a research lab. Not in a pilot program. In real hospitals, across specialties, within regulatory frameworks, with the infrastructure and the workflows to make it repeatable, safe, and sustainable.
The answer, depending on who you ask and where you look, is: “not yet”. Or “not everywhere”. Or “yes, but only if…”

The next Additive Talks – Healthcare edition aims to get clarity on this topic.
A wide range of questions matter for this conversation. They include, for instance, : How do you build a quality management system inside a hospital that satisfies MDR or FDA requirements? How do you validate a patient-specific device that, by definition, will never be made twice? How do you justify the cost of an in-house 3D lab to a hospital administration that measures value in beds and billing cycles? How do you go from one surgical team that is passionate about 3D printing to an institution-wide program that can serve ten specialties reliably?

And on the commercial side: how does a company build an FDA-cleared, patient-specific device, get it into clinical practice, and scale distribution without losing the precision that makes it valuable in the first place?

Season 6 of Additive Talks will tackle these questions directly on:

Date: Wednesday, July 1st, 2026
Time: 15:30–16:30 CEST | 09.30-10.30 EDT
Format: Virtual panel | Free to attend