Something has matured in how the AM industry thinks about healthcare, and the conversation is sharper for it.
Where the industry once debated potential, practitioners are now deep in the specifics: how to manufacture custom medical products at scale, how to satisfy regulators who were not built with AM in mind, and how to move a bioprinting breakthrough from the lab into clinical practice. The Healthcare Conference track at RAPID + TCT 2026 is where those questions are being worked through this year, by experts actively navigating medical device manufacturing, regulatory strategy, bioprinting, and more.
Three of the track’s speakers shared what years of RAPID + TCT attendance have meant for their work, and what attendees can expect from their sessions this year.
Scaling Custom Orthotic Manufacturing via Standardized AM Workflows – Shrenik Jain, Operations Engineer, iOrthotics
“Attending RAPID + TCT has helped me stay closely aligned with where the AM industry is actually moving, especially as it shifts toward production,” says Jain. At iOrthotics, where AM has been central to manufacturing for nearly a decade, that kind of current, grounded industry knowledge feeds directly into how the company makes decisions.
Previous editions have given him a sharper sense of which process control approaches are actually holding up at scale, and where the industry’s assumptions are still outpacing the evidence. His session takes on one of the more persistent challenges in AM operations: how do you run a consistent production line when no two products are the same?
At iOrthotics, the answer came from reframing the question. “We solve this by standardizing the process, not the product,” he explains. “Personalization is built into the workflow as the default, while everything around it, machine parameters, material handling, post-processing, is tightly controlled and repeatable.”
It is a distinction that sounds simple but takes considerable discipline to execute, and one that pays off directly for patients.
AM enables design features that conventional manufacturing cannot get close to, “like variable stiffness and optimized structures,” which means patients end up with orthotics better matched to their individual biomechanics.
For Jain, that makes the broader argument for his session self-evident: “Scaling requires a shift toward standardization, process control, and repeatability, areas the industry is still maturing in,” he says. “This is exactly the kind of discussion that needs to happen now as more companies move into production AM.”
The OEM Collaboration: Navigating Quality and Regulation in Med Device Advanced Manufacturing – Laura Gilmour, Founder and Principal Consultant, LG Strategies, LLC
Gilmour has been attending RAPID + TCT since around 2009, which has given her “a front-row seat to how advanced manufacturing is evolving and what’s possible from a technical standpoint,” she says, though she is equally quick to point to the people as a source of value.
Over the years, conversations with engineers, innovators, and clinicians, people who approach the same problems from completely different professional vantage points, helped her understand “where the gaps are between cutting-edge manufacturing technology and medical device needs, and how to bridge them more effectively.” That is, in many respects, the work her consultancy was built around.
The gap she finds herself returning to most often is the one between how AM technology providers understand compliance and how the FDA actually expects it to work. “One of the biggest misconceptions is that there’s a one-size-fits-all pathway for additive manufacturing in medical devices,” she says.
In practice, everything flows from the specific risk-benefit profile of the device in question, and the documentation burden that comes with that is something AM teams consistently underestimate.
“Design choice, material selection, process change, and build parameters should be documented, justified, and fully traceable for FDA review and eventually, inspection,” Gilmour explains. “That depth of traceability is usually a big surprise for organizations coming into the medical device space.”
Her argument is that good OEM collaboration is what makes this manageable, provided both sides genuinely treat it as a partnership and not just a handoff. The trickiest part of getting there, in her experience, is cultural: “bringing the structure of FDA expectations into an environment that thrives on speed and iteration” requires real adjustment on both sides.
Her session offers a practical path through that, with strategies for protecting the pace and creative flexibility that makes AM worth adopting while still building the documentation and risk management foundations that will hold up under regulatory scrutiny.
Bioprinting of Patient-Specific Multiple Myeloma Models for Personalized Treatment – Julio Aleman, CTO and Co-Founder, Linton Lifesciences
Aleman’s route to CTO ran through academic research at Wake Forest Institute of Regenerative Medicine (WFIRM) and Harvard–Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and conferences like RAPID + TCT gave him something those settings rarely offer. “Academic institutions tend to be at the forefront of technology development and innovation, however conferences like [RAPID + TCT] showcase the technologies that have matured and are robust enough to be sustainable on the market,” he says.
At Linton Lifesciences, that work centers on Multiple Myeloma, a blood cancer that behaves so differently from one patient to the next that conventional cell cultures and animal models cannot capture it with the precision personalised treatment requires.
Aleman’s session introduces a bioprinting workflow that addresses this directly, building patient-specific disease models using “all humanized and recombinant technology that allows us to achieve precise and reproducible products, stepping away from ambiguous materials that can be biochemically and mechanically unpredictable.”
Beyond the biological accuracy, the workflow also reproduces physical tissue properties that only emerge in spatially distributed, matured environments, something no conventional model can do, and that matters enormously when predicting a specific patient’s response to treatment.
On the regulatory side, the FDA’s recently published NAMs Framework “lays down the initial guidelines to streamline these technologies from benchtop into routine clinical practices,” and much of the clinical infrastructure needed to handle patient samples already exists. The remaining challenge is getting protocols that have developed largely in parallel to start working in concert.
For those who do not see themselves as bioprinting specialists, Aleman puts it simply: “If you are aware of the impact 3D bioprinting technologies are having on de-risking the personalized approach, you will find yourself choosing the superior treatment.”
RAPID + TCT 2026 take place April 14-16 in Boston, Massachusetts. To claim your free Expo Pass, or 20% Conference Pass discount, as a guest of 3D Printing Industry, click here.
3D Printing Industry is inviting speakers for its 2026 Additive Manufacturing Applications (AMA) series, covering Energy, Healthcare, Automotive and Mobility, Aerospace, Space and Defense, and Software. Each online event focuses on real production deployments, qualification, and supply chain integration. Practitioners interested in contributing can complete the call for speakers form here.
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Featured image shows in-depth discussions cover a wide range of AM topics, from the industry-specific to Materials and Process Development. Photo via SME.
