The Line Between Innovation and Profit: When It’s Not All About the Money

Two-year-old Kate Berkholtz from Huntsville, Ala., was born with symbrachydactyly, a congenital abnormality that prevented her left hand from fully developing in the womb. She has no functional fingers. But when Jason Hundley, president and CEO of Huntsville-based Zero Point Frontiers Corporation (ZPFC), heard about Kate, he and his company’s engineering team were able to come up with a prosthetic hand design that cost no more than $5 to fabricate.

The 3-D printing process for the prosthetic is relatively simple. An image created by engineers is uploaded to a memory card very similar to the cards found in digital cameras. The printer has built-in processors that tell the printer motor and head exactly how to move back and forth as it sprays the plastic to form, layer by layer, the prosthetic. Although the Makerbot cost around $3,000 to purchase, the prosthetic, composed of a stock corn-based biodegradable polymer polylactic acid filament, fishing wire and screws, cost only between $3.80 and $5 to make, according to Jason Hundley’s best estimates.

“Costs are kept low essentially because of the 3-D printing technology,” Hundley told Medical Product Outsourcing. “Most of that cost is in the straps and in the wires that we attach manually after printing. We print 90 percent of the hand, and the print cost alone is about 60 to 80 cents per copy.”

Pediatric orthopedics is traditionally an underserved space. Crafting orthopedic implants such as pins, rods or even joint replacements is a herculean task for bodies that are growing at a rapid pace. The same problem applies to non-invasive prosthetics, because depending on the age of the child, they may need replacing every few months. According to a 2009 report on the cost of prosthetics costs by Rhonda Turner, Ph.D., the proverbial “arm and a leg” really does prove prohibitively expensive for many people. A lower extremity prosthesis such as a leg can cost between $5,000 and $50,000. An upper extremity device—an arm—can range from $3,000 to $30,000.

“This technology addresses an area that the medical industry has not prioritized through their standard production techniques,” Hundley said. “It is almost idealized for children. When we did the system engineering analysis and looked at why a lot of insurances don’t cover prosthetics for kids, we found it was due to the current expensive prosthetics designed for adults.”

Hundley explained that adult prosthetics are designed, understandably, for multiple and wide-ranging functionality, long life and aesthetics. But very young children don’t care that much about aesthetics, noted Hundley. Young children also are just learning to use their appendages, and don’t always need a wide range of functionality.

“Therefore, instead of having a single, $10,000 device that is good for every conceivable function and can be worn for five to six years, we can use 3-D printing technology to turn that paradigm upside down,” Hundley said. “We have a $5 unit cost. Will it last five years? No. But it will last several months, and that’s all you need for a child. This technology brings something that was the price of a car down to the price of a latte.”

Kate’s prosthetic is ZPFC’s first foray into the biomedical space. The company’s expertise is in space engineering, and it works with NASA to develop in-space architectural tools, space launch systems, and other technologies. But the future, as Hundley stressed in speaking with MPO, is in 3-D printing technology.

“3-D printing will revolutionize pediatric orthopedics,” Hundley predicted. “If it hasn’t already, it will in the next two or three years. 3-D printing hasn’t even begun to blow up yet. The reason you’re seeing 3-D printing in the media today is because the patents that expired on plastic extrusion has allowed, for the first time in history, 3-D printing devices to come to market that cost less than $5,000. And that just happened in the last year to 18 months. There is a whole different technology that covers metals, and those patents are set to expire next year. When those patents expire you’re going to see another class of machines start coming onto the market that are much lower cost, and you’ll see a fusion of technologies between plastic and metals in next few years.”

The rapidly growing field of 3-D printing has kept costs almost unbelievably low for Kate’s prosthetic, but ZPFC is not finished yet. The company still is in the development period. Kate has tried on the hand, which responds to her wrist movements, a few times, and each time the engineers at ZPFC make further modifications to improve the fit and functionality.

“We’re still in the development period. We’ve gone through about a dozen prototypes trying to refine the design,” Hundley explained. “Our corporate expertise with prosthetics is growing and we’re moving up that knowledge curve.

“We’re not actually interested in turning this into a profit making enterprise,” he continued. “Our goal would be to make this an open-source template design so that anybody in the world who has a similar condition can have their own prosthetic made. We want to create more template designs so we can handle different ages. We want to make it basically so that anybody could be able to print their own hand if we can connect them to the right resources. We view this is as giving back to the community rather than turning a profit.”

And if Hundley’s predictions—and the current market trends—are right, in five to six years, 3-D printers will be as ubiquitous as regular office printers are today. As ZPFC’s website states, “The future of industrial development will not be defined by the factory but by desktop product printing.”