In this weekend’s 3D Printing News Briefs, we’ll start off with some business news, as Xact Metal announced continued double digit growth in Q2 and Q3 of 2025, and the Saudi Electricity Company is joining the National Additive Manufacturing and Innovation Company as an investor. Moving on to materials, AmeraLabs launched an elastomer 3D printing that maintains flexibility over time, and EPFL researchers are 3D printing ultra-strong metal and ceramic materials inside hydrogels. We’ll finish with medical research, as CTIBIOTECH entered a strategic collaboration to work on bioprinted inner ear organoids made from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC), and University of Saskatchewan researchers are developing a better 3D lung model.
Xact Metal Continues Growth in Q2 & Q3, Adds to Sales Team
Formnext 2024. Image courtesy of Xact Metal.
Privately funded metal additive manufacturing (AM) company Xact Metal, headquartered in Pennsylvania, offers high-quality 3D printers at affordable prices, so all manufacturers, developers, and designers can experience the benefits. This approach of decentralizing AM is obviously working well for them, as the company recently announced that it continued its double digit growth in the second and third quarters of 2025. Versus the same periods in 2024, Xact Metal grew orders into double digits in both Q2 and Q3. Additionally, to further support its continuing growth, the company expanded its commercial sales team with the addition of Mark Barfoot, Jim Snodgrass and Wyatt Fink. As Xact Metal CEO Juan Mario Gomez said, these three “bring strong technical and commercial experience in metal additive manufacturing,” and with an expanded team, the company will “expand our focus into other industry segments, like medical and aerospace.”
“2025 continues to be a strong year for us. In both 2Q and 3Q of this year, we achieved over 30% growth rates in both quarters, continuing the strong order revenue that we saw in late 2024 and the first quarter of 2025,” said Gomez. “Over the last two years we have worked hard to meet the needs of key industry segments, like defense and plastic injection molding. This focus on key industry applications, together with our strategy to bring metal powder-bed fusion to small and medium size organizations and to decentralize central labs at large organizations continues to be welcomed by our customers.”
Saudi Electricity Company Joins NAMI as Strategic Investor with 30% Stake
The Saudi Electricity Company (SEC) has signed an agreement to join 3D Systems and the Saudi Arabian Industrial Investment Company (Dussur) as a strategic investor in the National Additive Manufacturing and Innovation Company (NAMI). SEC is acquiring a 30% stake in NAMI, with the goal being to speed up the country’s advanced manufacturing, reverse engineering, and application development capabilities. The company’s founding shareholders had a vision for NAMI to lead the industrial transformation over priority sectors across Saudi Arabia, and over the last few years, it’s been offering both polymer and metal AM solutions out of its application center and component manufacturing facility in Riyadh, featuring 3D Systems’ technology. SEC has received high-performance components like motor fans, heat sinks, and pump impellers, from NAMI, and its investment is reflective of an ambition to optimize the supply chain. With SEC as a strategic shareholder, NAMI’s credibility in the energy sector will surely go up, and the company is now also ready to launch several strategic initiatives, such as expanding its production capabilities, developing a comprehensive digital inventory for SEC’s spare parts, and more. NAMI will soon begin integrating SEC’s strategic input into its growth roadmap.
Faisal Al-Tubayyeb, NAMI Chairman of the Board, said, “This partnership solidifies NAMI as the Additive Manufacturing National Champion in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, further accelerating our traction in serving the 4th industrial revolution through fostering innovation and digitization in line with Vision 2030.”
AmeraLabs Launches FLX-300 Elastomer Resin for Soft, Flexible Prints
Lithuania-based AmeraLabs, which develops and manufactures professional-grade 3D printing resins for industrial and engineering applications, has announced the launch of its first elastomer 3D printing resin designed for functional, soft, and flexible parts that hold on to those properties over time. The new FLX-300 features “exceptionally low compression set,” so parts will reliably return to their original shape, even after multiple deformations and compressions. It’s this shape recovery ability that makes the resin a great choice for applications like gaskets and seals, soft robotics grippers and components, vibration dampeners, and more. As opposed to most flexible resins that harden gradually after printing, internal testing shows that FLX-300 parts maintain their hardness and flexibility after three months, with no measurable degradation. Other features include high elongation at break for flexibility without tearing, low water absorption to maintain dimensional stability in humidity, zero shrinkage during post-curing, non-tacky surface finish after standard UV curing, and silicone-like softness with great compressibility. The new FLX-300 by AmeraLabs is available through the company shop and authorized resellers, and will soon come to Amazon US and Amazon UK.
“Most flexible resins are a compromise – they start soft but gradually harden over weeks or months. We developed FLX-300 to maintain its properties over time. This opens up real engineering applications, not just temporary prototypes,” said Andrius Darulis, the Co-Founder of AmeraLabs.
EPFL Researchers Develop 3D Printing Method for Ultra-Strong Materials
Large iron gyroid (1.3 x 1.0 cm) ALCHEMY EPFL CC BY SA
Because vat photopolymerization is mostly used with light-sensitive polymers, its applications are limited. And while some 3D printing methods have been developed to convert the polymers into tougher ceramics and metals, Daryl Yee, head of the Laboratory for the Chemistry of Materials and Manufacturing in the School of Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), explained that materials made with those techniques often have major structural issues, such as strength-reducing porosity and shrinkage. Yee and his fellow researchers have developed a 3D printing method that grows metals and ceramics inside hydrogels, which enables ultra-strong, dense, and intricate constructions of parts for next-gen biomedical, energy, and sensing technologies. Instead of using UV light to harden resins that have been pre-infused with metal precursors, the EPFL team creates a 3D scaffold out of a hydrogel, which they then infuse with metal salts before chemically converting it into nanoparticles containing metal. These nanoparticles then permeate the 3D structure. After 5-10 cycles, the remaining hydrogel is burned away, which just leaves a dense, strong, metal or ceramic printed object in the shape of the original “blank” polymer.
As detailed in their study, the team demonstrated their method’s ability to print strong, complex structures by fabricating gyroids out of copper, iron, and silver. They applied increasing pressure to the gyroids, and found that their materials were able to withstand 20 times more pressure than ones produced with other methods, and only exhibited 20% shrinkage, as opposed to 60-90%. The process can be repeated to create composites with very high concentrations of metal or ceramic, and the researchers say it could be very useful for fabricating advanced 3D architectures that have to be strong, complex, and lightweight all at once, like biomedical devices, sensors, and devices for energy storage and conversion. This method could also work for printing high-surface area metals with advanced cooling properties.
CTIBIOTECH Announces Strategic Agreement with SATT AxLR and CILCARE for Bioprinted Inner Ear Organoids
Principle of 3D bioprinting and 3D bioprinter in action
Biotechnology firm CTIBIOTECH was selected by SATT AxLR and CILCARE for a strategic collaboration to support the development of the OrgaEar project, which is working to create the first 3D bioprinted inner ear organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSC). The idea is to develop advanced pharmacological screening tools for hearing disorders research, and optimize previous protocols for getting inner ear organoids by using CTIBIOTECH’s technology. The World Health Organization says one in four people will be affected by hearing loss by 2050, making hearing disorders a growing global public health issue. But, no pharmacological treatment exists yet to either prevent or restore hearing loss, and while hearing aids and implants can improve a person’s sound perception, they don’t target the biological causes behind the hearing loss. CTIBIOTECH has shown that it can mass produce complex human skin models, and will now use its bioproduction, automation, and bio-extrusion AM technologies to fabricate inner ear organoids.
“Working alongside CILCARE and SATT AxLR, we are helping to develop tools that will accelerate the discovery of treatments for hearing pathologies affecting more than 1 billion people worldwide,” said Dr. Nico Forraz, CEO of CTIBIOTECH. “This collaboration fits in perfectly with our strategy of reducing drug development costs and time through innovation in automation.”
Canadian Researchers Developing 3D Lung Models
Porcine lung tissue decellularization. Porcine lung tissue thawed and cut into 2–3 mm pieces. Decellularization was carried out through sequential treatments with non-ionic detergents (2 % sodium deoxycholate and 0.1–1 % Triton X-100), and 1× PBS buffer. Following treatment, the tissue was lyophilized and subjected to enzymatic digestion with pepsin (1 mg/mL) to achieve a final tissue concentration of ∼8 mg/mL.
Finally, researchers from the College of Engineering and the Vaccine and Infectious Disease Organization (VIDO) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask) are working to develop a better human long model for improved disease prevention and treatment. It’s difficult to treat diseases like cystic fibrosis and tuberculosis, and that has something to do with the 2D models used to study the diseases—they don’t accurately reflect the shape. The organ contains an extracellular matrix, inside which the lung cells live, and this would be better replicated in a 3D model. They developed special bioinks containing living cells that they grew and incorporated into the models, which were then 3D printed. Using the Canadian Light Source at the university to inspect their models without damaging the samples, the team found that they provide an environment in which human lung cells can survive, and even grow. According to VIDO’s Dr. Nuraina Dahlan, a model that perfectly mimics human lungs could be a “game-changer” for treating, and even preventing, lung diseases.
“That will allow us to not only study diseases, but also to use lab-grown lungs as a replacement for transplantation. Either way, having a more accurate lung model allows us to make personalized treatment strategies: we can test whether a particular drug is suitable for a specific patient,” Dr. Dahlan said. “Ultimately, this model gives us better options for lung disease prevention and treatment.”
You can learn more in the research team’s published paper.
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