In an era of challenges to the additive manufacturing (AM) industry, mostly driven by the technology’s relatively high cost at a time when financing production equipment is more expensive, many are pondering whether or not AM can evolve in a way that allows it to achieve significant scale.
A recently published study on AM opportunities in the dental market demonstrates that the dental industry has been able to create a subsector of AM that has evolved significantly over the past ten years. In this time, AM in dentistry has gone from a fairly isolated and relatively expensive tech with a specific purpose to something that is now cost effective, productive, user friendly, and automated enough to be adapted industry-wide at scale. This is the dream of basically all of AM, and the dental industry has achieved it in 2025.
This is great news for healthcare, where the adoption of AM has a different set of rules…
Feature image courtesy of 3DPrint.com: An AI-generated visualization representing advancements in dental 3D printing.