Imagine a world without 3D printing. Engineers and product designers wait weeks or even months for prototypes. Part complexity is constrained by the reach and size of the cutting tools and machinery used to produce it. The notion of unlimited design freedom is science fiction, personalization is something that only the wealthy can afford, and the term “service bureaus” refers to buildings filled with mainframe computers performing data-intensive tasks like payroll processing and customer billing.
This was the world that Charles “Chuck” Hull navigated during the early 1980s while working as vice president of engineering at San Gabriel, Calif.-based Ultra Violet Products (UVP), which is now Analytik Jena US, which designs and manufactures ultraviolet (UV) light sources for industrial and scientific applications.
Frustrated with the lengthy lead times for plastic injection-molded part prototypes, Hull had a radical notion. What if he could leverage several pieces of, at the time, newfangled technologies—lasers, personal computers and CAD software—to “build” three-dimensional parts by fusing layer upon layer of UV-cured resin?
He presented the idea to upper management in hopes of commercializing his brainchild, and although his boss didn’t think much of it, he was gracious enough to let Hull use the company’s facilities on nights and weekends. Hull jumped at the opportunity.
Chuck Hull, 2014 AM Industry Achievement Award Winner, Executive Vice President and CTO, Regenerative Medicine, 3D Systems Corp.
Late one evening in 1983, Hull called his wife and asked her to drive down to the lab. He then showed her the fruit of his months-long project—a simple plastic eye wash cup and the world’s first 3D-printed part. The following year, Hull applied for a patent on his “Apparatus for production of three-dimensional objects by stereolithography,” and by 1986 he co-founded 3D Systems Corp., Rock Hill, S.C., where he continues to serve as executive vice president. Prototyping problem solved.
Now imagine a world without 3D-printed organs. Patients wait months or even years for a heart, lung or kidney. Those lucky enough to survive until a suitable replacement becomes available must take immunosuppressant drugs for the rest of their lives to avoid organ rejection. Many die, and many more suffer an often painful existence due to a twist of fate or unlucky genetics.
But just as Chuck Hull upended manufacturing nearly four decades ago, he hopes that one day soon, the unfortunate and all-too-realistic scenario just described will be as unlikely as the need to wait months for a plastic prototype. Simply put, Hull aims to manufacture parts exponentially more intricate than eye wash cups or any other object that’s been printed thus far: human organs.
He’s well on his way to meeting this lofty goal. And in this case, Hull’s not spending his nights and weekends away from home to do it (well, maybe some of them). Working with Silver Spring, Md.-based United Therapeutics Corp., Hull indicates that the partners have solved many of the roadblocks to organ printing. “We put an agreement together around six years ago to 3D print human lungs, and have since expanded that to include the liver and kidneys,” he says.
As a result of this agreement, Hull now serves as the chief technology officer for regenerative medicine at 3D Systems and manages the company’s bioprinting operations in San Diego and Houston. The balance of the group’s collaborative efforts is performed at a United Therapeutics facility in Manchester, N.H., under the auspices of company founder and CEO Martine Rothblatt and a team of researchers.
To call it demanding work is a gross understatement. According to a 2022 press release from 3D Systems, the company is printing the most complex objects ever: A single lung scaffold consists of a whopping “44 trillion voxels that lay out 4,000 kilometers of pulmonary capillaries and 200 million alveoli.” The press release stated that scientists at United Therapeutics plan to cellularize these 3D-printed scaffolds with a patient’s own stem cells to create tolerable, transplantable human lungs that should not require immunosuppression to prevent rejection.
“We’re thrilled to share that our 3D-printed lung scaffolds are now demonstrating gas exchange in animal models,” Rothblatt said in the press release. “We are regularly printing lung scaffolds as accurately as driving across the United States and not deviating from a course by more than the width of a human hair. With the continued hard work of dedicated scientists and engineers at United Therapeutics and 3D Systems, we hope to have these personalized, manufactured lungs cleared for human trials in under five years.”
Such medical advancements are good news for all of us, but especially for those who will need a replacement organ one day. So are 3D Systems’ many other healthcare-related developments, which range from customized orthopedic implants and dental prostheses to “virtual surgical planning” and accelerated drug development tools through the company’s recently launched Systemic Bio business. None of it would have been possible were it not for Hull’s early efforts at reducing the lead times for plastic injection-molded prototypes.
No one can argue that Hull set the additive manufacturing (AM) wheels in motion. He invented stereolithography and will forever be known as the Father of 3D printing, but groundbreaking AM technologies like those we’ve seen over the past few decades—bioprinting among them—don’t develop in a vacuum.
Hull is the first to admit he had no experience operating a manufacturing business in those early days, let alone launching a company that would one day boast nearly 2,000 employees and more than $550 million in annual revenue. Still, he persevered. The 1986 economy was anemic and interest rates were ridiculously high, yet Hull put together a business plan and presented it to “countless potential investors” before finding one in Canada willing to take a chance on his audacious idea.
“I’d also spent quite a bit of time at Caltech [the California Institute of Technology], which offered what was called an MIT Enterprise Forum,” he says. “Entrepreneurs would go there one evening a month and present their plan to a group of experienced businesspeople, who would critique it and offer suggestions. That turned out to be a really valuable experience.”
So was finding a reliable business partner. Says Hull, “I met a guy who had formed a company years earlier and recently sold it. Ray Fried knew all about business management and was a big help in those early days.”
Cash flow constraints and a steep learning curve weren’t the only challenges. The build software and slicing tools available to today’s 3D-printing practitioners were still years in the future, and none of the CAD companies Hull spoke to seemed interested in developing them. Nor did the motion control systems needed to control the laser and build platform exist. Add to this the glacially slow processing capabilities of that era’s computers and Hull faced significant technical hurdles, all of which he had to solve on his own.
“I programmed everything by hand, one line at a time,” he laughs. “It was a case of telling the beam to move here and there, when to turn on and off, and so on. I had to develop all of it.”
When asked what the wisdom of hindsight tells him he should have done differently, Hull’s terse response was unsurprising. “I try to be a forward-looking person, so that’s not something I spend much time thinking about.”
It’s an excellent attitude to have. Hull is a named inventor on 85 U.S. patents, as well as numerous other patents globally. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014, and has earned awards from the European Patent Office, Frost & Sullivan’s Manufacturing Leadership Council, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences and many others. And based on his current efforts in bioengineering, it’s almost certain more awards will come.
Despite these accolades, Hull remains humble. “I look at all the different printing technologies out there today, and even though I was only responsible for some of it, I think of them as my children in a way.” He smiles. “The way it’s all evolved is pretty amazing.”
