Episode #108 | Teleporting Medicine with 3D Printing - Dr. Stephen Ryan, PolyUnity

What happens when a hospital needs a simple part but the supply chain takes weeks or months to deliver it? Dr. Stephan Ryan, physician and co-founder of PolyUnity, set out to solve that problem by helping hospitals produce parts themselves through safe, compliant 3D printing. In this episode, Stephen Ryan shares how early clinical experiences and an academic 3D printing lab evolved into a platform designed to help hospitals manufacture equipment on demand. The COVID pandemic accelerated that vision, exposing major supply chain gaps and pushing the team to rapidly scale production. Stephen Ryan explains how those lessons shaped PolyUnity’s approach to building practical additive manufacturing systems within the realities of healthcare procurement, regulation, and hospital workflows.

Bullet points:

• Defining PolyUnity’s mission to democratize hospital 3D printing with compliant workflows
• The rural hospital supply chain problem that sparked the original research project
• How COVID accelerated real-world production and forced end-to-end process design
• Why post-pandemic red tape returned and how it shaped the software moat
• Bootstrapping a medtech startup in Canada with long procurement cycles
• Building a small team and staying capital efficient through iterative deployment
• Good and "bad" ideas for hospital 3D printing applications
• High-ROI case applications that avoid big spend
• Distributed manufacturing hubs and the practical path toward on-site production
• The wisdom of choosing simple over complexity.
• Post-processing bottlenecks and what are potential solutions.
• Personal transformation from clinician to entrepreneur.
 
Show notes: https://3dheals.com/teleporting-medicine-with-3d-printing-dr-stephen-ryan-of-polyunity-interview/

Full video interview: https://youtu.be/cO7mTr5GLJ8?si=icmU03OI1cPDZJL9

About our guest: 

Dr. Stephen Ryan is a physician, entrepreneur, and the co-founder and Chief Medical Officer of PolyUnity, a Canadian health tech company focused on lowering the barrier for hospitals to adopt 3D printing through its i3D platform and solutions. His work centers on building software, quality systems, and distributed print capacity so that hospitals can reliably order and receive end use 3D printed parts, from simple fixtures to clinically relevant devices, within existing procurement and regulatory frameworks.

Transcript

Welcome And Guest Overview

SPEAKER_03 0:00

Hi there, welcome to the Lattice Episode 108. This is your host, Dr. Jenny Chen. In today's episode, our guest, Dr. Stefan Ryan, co-founder and chief medical officer of Holo Unity, shares how his startup is transforming healthcare with 3D printing. How a crisis turned into opportunities long after the pandemic, and how this hospital-focused 3D printing platform is saving costs and improving lives by innovating in hospital additive manufacturing. Enjoy. Please listen to the disclaimer at the end of this podcast. Hello, hello, good morning. Dr. Ryan, good to have you on the pod today. Very quick intro. Dr. Stefan Ryan is the co-founder and chief medical officer for PolyUnity, an incredible startup in Canada. And Stefan, why don't you tell us what is PolyUnity?

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Mm-hmm. This is a very long story, Jenny, but I will give you the short version. We are a company that has focused on lowering the barrier of entry to all hospitals in Canada to adopt 3D printing technologies effectively. So we're trying to democratize access, uh, build software that is easy to use, has all of the regulatory compliances and things that you need to consider to actually deploy real-end use 3D printable parts into your hospital setting. And that's our mission. Um, if I want to do the very short version, at the end of the day, we want to teleport medical equipment.

PolyUnity And The Teleporting Vision

SPEAKER_03 1:34

Yes. Um I would say that's a very high-level explanation what polyunity is. And I think one is your journey from physician to entrepreneur is quite commendable. I I really aspire to that myself. And I also believe we have met during the pandemic or maybe at the beginning of the pandemic. So the story of polyunity itself, the journey of the company, is also kind of parallel to your own personal journey. So if you can just walk us through that journey, it will be wonderful to understand, you know, obviously who you are, but also how this company came about and what actually it does, you know, in reality.

SPEAKER_00 2:17

Certainly. And you and you are right. Uh we bounced off each other, I believe, during the pandemic, and then shortly afterwards when we started to get a little more traction and uh presence in the Canadian marketplace. I think we we touched base really, really early days, but that's now, believe it or not, almost, you know, six years ago. So um we have a lot to catch up about. So the the origin story is uh is interesting and and it has ultimately kind of changed the whole trajectory of my life. Um, but it goes like this. When I was in uh medical school, I was told I had to do a research project, and I didn't really want to do anybody else's research project. I wanted to get creative and make something um that was impactful and meaningful to me. And uh I really got interested in the technology space uh within healthcare and medicine. And that was back in 2014. So if you remember, um, one of the coolest stories of the time was NASA 3D printing a part on the International Space Station. So I see this and and light bulbs go off, and I go, that's teleporting, right? They they had nothing, and then they asked for something and then sent an email, and boom, you have a a part up in in space to fix a problem. When I was doing rotations through rural Newfoundland Labrador, I would go out to different remote and rural hospitals, and things looked different, right? Like the equipment was older, and uh, like let's just say replacement parts weren't maybe readily available or new equipment wasn't readily available. And what I think I was observing at the time was supply chain, right? And I didn't know that term, but I just knew things looked different. And it and this was just the end of the supply chain. Um so the the moment of realization was if you know NASA can do this in space, why can't we do it out, like just to the periphery, out to these remote sites? And I think that's where the genesis of this whole thing came from was just getting obsessed over the concept of sending medical equipment to where it had to go at the point of consumption, right? Um I I'll fast forward a a little bit now, uh, which was that that took root as a research project uh in the university, but ultimately we spun it out then into what polyunity is today. And uh the timing was very interesting because when we did that, within a calendar year, the pandemic happened. So we had built a small functional print firm, uh had some concepts of of how we wanted to approach this and build our startup, but we had a real-time, real-world use case fall on our laps, which was we had to we had to weaponize this this manufacturing unit that we had built to live respond to needs of our province. And then then then all of the pieces started coming together. You needed a manufacturing site, you needed software to manage the whole thing, how do people place orders? How do people validate the part? How do they pay for the part? And this is where all the complexities and nuances of the platform we've built now came from. So we did an amazing job of responding to uh uh the needs of our province back in the pandemic and really set the stage for us to be able to then push across Canada and replicate that style of project over and over and over again until now we're fulfilling orders in parts off of um using added manufacturing technology all the way from St. John's Newfoundland on the East Coast to BC on the west coast. And uh so that's uh the the the longer.

SPEAKER_03 5:38

Yeah, that's a fantastic yeah, yeah, fantastic summary. You know, for people, okay, I agree. The supply chain term, I had no idea what that was until the pandemic. Then everybody's talking about supply chain. And it seems like the problem that you were trying to solve, though, was even before it happened it existed before the pandemic, it kind of exacerbated during the pandemic.

Rural Supply Chains Spark The Idea

SPEAKER_00 6:01

I say it shined a really ugly flashlight on things that were already wrong, right? That's what the pandemic did. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 6:08

So want to just define the problem because when you were in those rural towns that you were rotating through, what what equipment were missing? Because I'm, you know, why can't just Amazon it?

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Mm-hmm. Well, this this this brings into question a bigger, a bigger issue, which is that of procurement, right? And you can't just buy things off of Amazon and put it into hospitals. This is where like vendorship and and suppliers and vetted organizations and trusted vendors, all of these concepts are in place on purpose to kind of you know have a safety net around medical equipment. And and you know, we had to learn this the hard way, but you can't just print something and bring it into a hospital. It doesn't work that way. No, very similarly to you can't just order something on Amazon and bring it into a hospital. There's there's due process uh that sits underneath all of that that makes all of this possible in the first place. So, you know, the the very easy examples, I mean, I would observe, would just be like, you know, cracked plates or or or assemblies or you know, just like worn-out armrests on cancer treatment beds, or like insert thing here. It would just all be patched up. And I'm not trying to say that 3D printing is a catch-all for all of these things, but the low-hanging fruit things that you can start to chip away at and build a strong foundation and base uh system. Which parts can you make on 3D printing and where should they go and how do they get there? My my thesis here is that you start really simple. And if you can build a system that can address the simple things, then you can have a strong foundation to build complexity. And you know where this is going as much as I do. This is going to now turn into pharmaceuticals that are 3D printed and customized to you. This is going to turn into bioprinting, this is gonna turn into custom splints and casting. But if you can't do it for the simple and incuous things in your hospital, like a test tube rack or a wall mount for a hand sanitizer, you're never going to get there with these more complex ones. So that's what when I'm when I'm talking about democratizing access to things, I'm I'm looking towards the future. And how do we have a system in place inside hospitals that they can consume anything like this down the road? But you need to have it set up first.

SPEAKER_03 8:25

But obviously, obvious, uh, all these systems that you mentioned, the different verticals it can potentially go to also poses different challenges down the line for you, too, right?

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Oh, absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 8:36

Yeah. So does it does this start it as a movement uh or project that's funded by the government and then eventually evolve into a company? Or how how does become now formalized into polyunity, which is actually uh are you guys venture back now or is still mostly no, very much, very much bootstrapped. Yeah. That's amazing. That is amazing.

SPEAKER_00 8:59

Believe it or not, believe it or not. And uh I think that uh that's a whole other conversation about about um the appetite for for venture capital to get into the med tech space in Canada. It's just it's just very difficult. Um, but that that's a whole other a whole other kettle of fish. Um this, yeah, this started as a research project. So it was MonMed3D. Um, Memorial University was where I did schooling. And um my two co-founders and I started that research initiative purely as an educational thing. It was we we we knew that 3D printing wasn't universally understood. People didn't know what it could do, what the vision of it was going to be. So you had to almost desensitize an entire market uh before you commercialized into it. You had to explain what this was, what the potential value to the system was going to be, et cetera. And the easiest way to do that was yeah, it was a government-funded uh bit of bit of uh cash we got, deployed a state-of-the-art 3D printing facility, and it serviced our med school, it serviced our local kind of like medical community. Um, but really quickly, then when the again this pandemic hit and we commercialized, our ecosystem around us understood it. They knew it. It wasn't this new concept anymore. We had been running this thing for a couple years, so it was already top of mind. They they knew what a machine was, they knew what the materials were, they knew what the application types could be. So it wasn't this starting from zero education process when we when we started to build the company. And I think this is like very evidenced now. We've been around for eight years, and we've been talking to people inside hospitals every single day. And this went from you enter a room and you ask, Do you know what a 3D printer is? And maybe you get one hand, one hand raised, right? And you're like, oh, that's the that's the person I gotta go talk to. Now we go into rooms and you say, Does anybody know what a 3D printer is? Everybody's hand shoots up, and not just that. They say, Oh yeah, my kid has one in the basement, or oh, oh yeah, I have one in my hospital, you know, or I've seen one down the hall. And I think this just like like is a is a cool indicator of ecosystem maturity. But I think the ecosystem is still lagging behind the rigor that it needed in in healthcare. So you're just because you have a machine doesn't mean you can make things, right? Yeah, that was a trap that we fell into eight years ago. We said, oh, we got machines, we can make things. Uh, but but again, then the realization came in that there's bigger systems at play around you. And uh some of these regulatory pieces of the puzzle, the quality management pieces of the puzzle, all of those things are now the moat, and I think the necessity that brings these machines to life now.

SPEAKER_03 11:41

You know, I have to say, even today, if you Google 3D printing, it still shows 3D printing useless gadgets of plastic parts, not something, you know, what you guys are doing. Um, and and I think like at the beginning, when you encountered this technology, you were kind of part enthusiast, but also part skeptics as well. How did you transform yourself and eventually become a fanatic, I would say?

Pandemic Response Builds The Platform

SPEAKER_00 12:08

I I remember the first time I saw a video of a 3D printer on a YouTube video, and this is well before actually kicking off the whole MonMed 3D thing. I was absolutely taken by it then. I just couldn't quite wrap my head around the ability to have a little machine in the corner of a room that can make things for you. It just broke the concept of manufacturing or going to Walmart to buy something. You know, like it just just having something there that can make things for you. It's like a paper printer. Like years ago, right? You would have to go to a library or you would have to go somewhere to get you know something printed on a piece of paper, and now they're in every single household, right? Like, and and I could just see a future where, you know, if the price points came down on these things, the materials improved, the applications started showing up, these would be household items, and it is starting to go there. And uh I don't think I ever had a chasm to cross on did I believe in it or did I think it was going to be impactful to the world. I was hooked line sinker day one, and it changed my whole life. Uh, like I knew when I started medicine that I was gonna end up here one way or the other, but I'm stubborn. So I finished medical school, I finished my residency, I practiced for for five years and kind of ran this off, you know, the side of the desk with a great leadership team. But you know, push comes to shove, and you have to think about what do I want to do for the next 40 years and what do I want my legacy to be, and what do I, you know, what gets me up in the morning and what inspires me. And seeing this thing growing without me here full time was starting to uh really grate on my on my mind.

SPEAKER_03 13:47

So yeah, a year ago I've got part-time the whole time. I can't believe it.

SPEAKER_00 13:52

I know, I know. And a year ago, I just had to rip the band-aid. Um, a bit of an identity crisis, you know, you you kind of have to re-configure who you are then because you introduced me as as Dr. Ryan at the beginning of this thing, and I don't know if I call myself that anymore. You know, it's um now I'm I'm the the founder of PolyUnity. Like that's that's my my title.

SPEAKER_03 14:11

Well, should I call you Dr. Stefan? Make it less formal.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Sure.

SPEAKER_03 14:15

Because people call me Dr. Jenny all the time. I'm fine with that. You know, it's like Dr. Phil.

SPEAKER_00 14:20

Right. There you go. We'll go call it Dr. Steve for now, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 14:25

So okay, so you were doing this fantastic project in the moment of crisis that's that was very needed, and people see the value. What happens after that crisis is over? Like, did you feel the wave of enthusiasm kind of become muted? Yes.

SPEAKER_00 14:45

Yeah, oh yeah. And then what happens, oh my, like this company shouldn't exist. It you know, it really has gone through eight moments of existential crisis, which is like you the first one being immediately post-pandemic, where you do this unbelievable thing, you respond to a moment, you you know, produce products on site, on demand, in a province that has no manufacturing capacity to make these things. And then but the reason it happened was because for a flash in the pan, red tape got cut, right? Like it was a moment where where the cuffs came off and we were able to do things that traditionally in these systems you can't. But what what we observed, uh Jenny, right on the heels of that was the red tape came back in a big way. The pendulum just swung. And as much, as much infrastructure and capacity that we we built up, and there was other manufacturing units that were spun up in our area of the world too, just went back to original suppliers with original contracts, and all of the progress that we had made, not only did it get like absolutely decimated, if anything, we went backwards because people then started to ask questions, and they were valid. What is the part? What is it made of? Where does it go? Did infection prevention and control sign off on this? Did biomed sign off on this? Which budget does this come out of? All of these system level things that we didn't have to think about during the pandemic suddenly showed up. And that could have been a moment in time where we said, well, this is too complicated, like I'm walking away from this. But we looked at it as an opportunity to learn the system. So the more walls we hit, the more ability to build into our software things that just got apart through. And now when we show up to a hospital and we get asked these questions, we say, yep, we got a system for that, we have a system for that, we have a system for that. And then everyone goes, Oh, okay, you've you've thought of it all. Well, I guess we can proceed. You know, it's uh it's it's interesting. But I think I think you you you hit the nail on the head, which is post-pandemic could have been a could have been a a death of a company moment, but I think it was also the opportunity that allowed us to learn and and grow and persist.

SPEAKER_03 17:04

So you had to interact with a lot of hospital administrators and their own engineers and procurement departments. What is the problem uh that I mean what what is the difference between thinking that first of all resulted in the problem of lacking equipment in a certain way? Um and to how are you different in terms of thinking of these problems? I mean, does it make a difference whether or not you're a doctor?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

I think just from the the vision aspect of the company and our ability to communicate what we do to certain clinicians, like like clinical level people, like beyond the the spare parts and things now. Like we we are um into the custom scan to print casting world or the splinting world, and we do a bowl of service for for cancer care. So it's it's these clinical settings that I think where where I particularly fall into the mix is I'm like a translator, right? Like you have clinical people with needs and requests and wants, and then somehow that needs to get packaged up and sent to a team of engineers to come up with the solution, design the part, design the thing, and uh vice versa. Then you have to take that engineering language and pass it through a bit of a filter and and relay that back to clinical people or hospital systems. And uh that's that's where I'm I'm I think I'm thriving at this point in time, right? It like I took like a you know 20 years in in a healthcare system and now it can be a bit of like that clinical and engineering liaison to make sure that the communication is working well and the products that we deliver are what has been requested in the first place. And I think that's that's really really cool and and a neat way to package up my past into something useful now.

SPEAKER_03 18:46

Yeah, maybe not a translator, but a master communicator.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

Sure. Yeah, let's call it that.

SPEAKER_03 18:51

Not everybody I I I can't talk to a hospital administrator as well as you do, probably.

SPEAKER_00 18:57

Well, that just that's just muscles you have to flex. I couldn't either the first time.

SPEAKER_03 19:00

If you just learn people like avoid you in the hallway now because they say that's the 3D printing guy. He's gonna talk to us about 3D printing.

Red Tape Returns And Becomes Moat

SPEAKER_00 19:09

Not at all. And and and I think that's a that's a difference maybe between the Canadian system too, is we're we're we're not like salesy, right? Like we're not like a rep running around the hospital. We're we're part of your team, and we wouldn't be force feeding you something if we didn't think it was going to add value. And we're at a point now where we don't go and hunt. We have a platform that has an ideas intake portal. And when people want us, they find us, they go in, they submit their request with their idea, maybe sketch something on a napkin, say, I can't find this, or I wish I had something like this. Um, and then that's when our team picks it up and starts building it and ultimately then hosts it inside of our digital inventory tool where other people can access it, right? So yeah, I think that's one of the interesting moments of turning of a tide. When you're in a startup, I think the first, you know, 10 years or five years, especially in med tech, can feel like you're just, you know, pounding sand and running against walls. And that one moment when somebody comes to you, and then that is a repeatable thing, that's like, okay, okay, it's catching on. You know what we do. You came to us with the right idea, with the right concept, and know that we can make that with our machines. Brilliant. Like, like if that means that the education has caught up to the application and the people know what we do, now we're now we're now we're talking, right?

unknown 20:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:30

And that's only in the last couple of years has this has this kind of started to happen.

SPEAKER_03 20:34

You know, one thing I really love about working with Pitch 3D, the program that we have with startup, is I am able to interact with startups all over the world. And before meeting you, Stephanie, I had no idea where uh Newfoundland Laboratory is. Labrador is a breed of dog. Edge of the world, as I know. Uh didn't know it was actually a part of uh Canada. Also didn't know what Novo Scotia. Is that right? Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia. Yeah, no idea. It sounds so foreign. And so I thought it was like somewhere, you know, in Eastern Europe or something like that. Um, but the different geography does make a lot of difference in how you fund a company and how you become entrepreneur, it's very different because of the local environment. You do not have a surplus of rich people to give you money for adventures. No, nobody has that sort of spare, and there's no community to support this this kind of venture. So, how did you guys carry yourself from you know mostly government funded and now bootstrapping essentially? And how did you form the team? Let's not miss the team here, because you got a fantastic team around.

SPEAKER_00 21:46

So I'll go I'll go one and two. So one is is like how how how we how we manage to to fund this thing. So not a yeah, you're right. Like it's not a massive angel network around us or or readily available. Venture money, but what we do have is a very close-knit and self-interested tech community. Um, we're from a place where uh typically we anchor our existence on things that can go away. Fishing, right? Like a fishery uh it collapses, then you have no fish, you're you're you gotta figure something else out. Oil, right? You drill all the oil, that goes away. It's so it's so fleeting, and there's not a lot of a sustainable base for keeping a province like running. And maybe about 15 years ago, the they were ri the province was really clever and and really doubled down on tech because it's untethered to a resource, it's just tethered to ideas and people who can pull off amazing things. Um, and like even in our our local tech ecosystem right now in Newfoundland, I think we're on track to have the most unicorns per capita in maybe Canada in Canada. Yeah. Wow. And uh it's it's it's ridiculous. But it but again, I think it's a side effect of just being small enough that everybody knows everybody. We share war stories about our sales cycles and our and our and our pathways through different markets. There's a lot of support, but also the government side of things gives gives a lot of funding runways to you. And because we're small, they can afford to do so, right? Like uh and and we and we can kind of get a good runway and a good base out of government programs. So that's how we did it for a long time. But then obviously that only goes so far. And then you have to start actually revenue generating. We picked maybe the hardest thing in the world to do, which is try to sell to Canadian public health care system, but it's it's slowly starting to work. But you have sales cycles and procurement times, two to three years from first contact to any money. So now we're at the point where we're starting to stack some of these in a pipeline and it's starting to kind of decouple right from from uh um our revenue baselines, which is really exciting. But it's only now, after eight years, where this is starting to happen. So we had to get very creative and be very frugal. Um if it was if we had unlimited money, I would have the fanciest machines in the world, I would have a hundred people on staff. But I think accidentally, by doing it small and bootstrapped, we actually found the right path forward. Because I think you can take a lot of capital and overshoot what the market actually is looking for. And I think that can create a product that is mismatched to the needs of a system. And then you risk it not working and collapsing, and you've just spent, you know,$10 million or something. Where we were able to literally just build a little piece, deploy it with a close client, with a close relationship. That's all we had the time, the resources, and the energy to do, perfected it, add the next thing, bring that to the next client. It was so small and iterative and purposeful and strategic that I think at the end of the day we built something that is robust and didn't take the venture money, took a little bit of time. But I think we have a product that is matched to the market now, which is really, really cool.

SPEAKER_03 25:06

Yeah. Um I think I think what you're talking about is capital efficiency. Um I'm not saying venture-bat startups are not capital efficient, but in certain cycles, you know, you could have a surplus of capital and not generating the kind of result where, like you said, it overshoots the kind of expectation and but it was not well received by the market. So, I mean, it does sound like a try and error process though, throughout these eight years to tinkering and see what works in a very capital-efficient way. And how how did how did you find your team to to able to suffer with you? Let's just say that, all on the journey.

Bootstrapping In Canadian Health Care

SPEAKER_00 25:45

That's a great term, actually. How did you trick them into this? I didn't trick anybody, it was amazing. Um, I think what happened here again was a was a um a pandemic catalyzed moment, which was, I don't know, like think about the psychology of an event like that, and what happens is people you question everything. Like, you know, with the whole world shut down, what am I? What do I want to do next? Because like everything's fleeting, everything's fragile, what do I want to commit to? And just during the turbulence of the pandemic, um, we we just managed to start interacting with local heroes, right? Because they were also solving the manufacturing parts of the puzzle. They were integrated into relief efforts, and we were too, so you're just in this melting pot of really amazing professional people. And uh, we were just lucky enough that that two of um our like our current CEO and president, they had just exited a company and were looking for the next thing effectively, and were kind of you know giving their time to the pandemic relief and bounced off us and started asking a few more questions. Like, what's the vision of this thing? Like, what is your what is you what do you actually want to achieve with this? And I think where it was in healthcare and had a good social cause, it was challenging. I think they they knew this was not going to be easy, but they did a lot of um uh government sales and government procurement cycles before, so knew the game. And ultimately, I think it was just really cool. I think they were like, okay, in the pandemic, we saw you turn on a print farm and produce a hundred thousand face shields for the province of Newfoundland in sub three months. What else can we do? And I think that's all all it took was just like a cool moment in time to see what this could be. Luckily, they had exited, so we're kind of free agents and had experience to know how to take something from a startup to enterprise. And um here we are, uh, you know, four or five years later with this team. And just given their experience, we're able to kind of you know nucleate and find the right people for the right job in a startup kind of setting. So now our development team is small, nimble, you know, AI enabled, super, super efficient. Our engineering and design team all operate under quality controls, QMS systems, like really tidy. And then the three of us now are on like the business development side with two sales and marketing people, like that's that's all of polyunity. And um, I think what we're able to achieve with a really aligned, hyper-focused, um, passionate group of people, it's yeah, it's just making some magic.

SPEAKER_03 28:22

Yeah, it does sound like it's magic and also important the uh ups and downs that you guys have to experience and still stick together. That that is pretty magical. Now, I always felt like you sat on just a tons of ideas because you know, polyunity basically collect ideas and try to convert it into a 3D printable parts or devices. What are some of the best ideas you're heard, the most creative ones, and what are some of the worst ideas ever? I want to hear that.

Best Requests And Misfit Print Ideas

SPEAKER_00 28:53

I'll start with the worst. And it's not that they're the wor it's not that they're the worst because they're bad ideas. It's just that it's it's it's a result of a of a mismatch of expectation of what printing can do, right? So it's like, you know, someone can show up and say, I want, you know, a perfectly engineered like stainless steel surgical retractor for this hyper-specialized thing. And you're like, yes, it's not it's not a bad idea, it's a great idea, but it's the worst application for like the 3D printing that we're doing. So again, it's just a mismatch of of perception. And the conversation we have then in that situation, if someone shows up with an idea like that, I never say no, I say not yet. Right? It's like just just give the industry a little bit of time to mature. We are printing in metal in the world. Like this is happening. The tolerance is needed, the quality controls around these things, like there's just a little bit of system maturity that needs to happen. So we take this idea and we'll we'll store it away. And well, I'll just say, listen, we got it flagged, as needs metal, needs higher quality, needs more tight Health Canada regulations. But when we, you know, stack our deck a little bit and the machines catch up, you know, listen, like doctor insert here, we'll get back to you and we can do this. So I don't know if I've heard like awful ideas. It's just um, are they are they feasible and and practical and able to be done with this type of uh manufacturing process? Um then the best idea. Sometimes the best idea is the simplest thing ever, right? Um, and and these are big capital cancellation projects that we would never know about unless like a team offered it up. And what I mean by capital cancellation is that you had a massive project your hospital was going to have to undertake because of uh a safety issue or a legacy part failure or something, and you're gonna have to replace a million dollars worth of equipment. And you can solve that with one piece of plastic or something, you know, like and and that might cost you$5,000 to cancel a million dollar project. And somebody in the hospital is just thinking about this and said, hmm, if only I had that, I don't need to do that. And that's like that's where massive ROI cases uh start to show up. And like a very, very simple version of this would be like, well, I'll give you two examples. Um there was a patient safety issue in a hospital here um where there was a loop um on a psych ward uh blind system. A loop, you can thread something through, safety issue, right? Because you patient protectivity, you get a bedsheet through it, you can you can read through the lines. To replace the entire blind system of uh of this psych ward was projected to be about$750,000. So they just said, we don't know how to fix this, but just can you help? So that was the idea, intake. Need new blind system. Okay. You take a loop and you turn into a peg so nothing can be tied to it or loop through it. Um, an adapter that this like kind of awning retractor thing can go up and interface with it, so you still crank the blinds up and down. You print a hundred of these things, you put them in and replace the loop. They didn't have to replace any of their windows, didn't have to replace any of the blinds, canceled a year-long project that was projected to be about$750,000. So, like simple little idea, massive impact. Yeah. And though, and those are the cool ones that you can start to uncover the longer you're in the space. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 32:20

It is not sexy per se when you put it on the video or whatever, but it's so impactful though. I mean, just imagine the millions of dollars of procurement the hospitals have to spend, and now instead that money can go to the patient care instead. Yeah. That is pretty amazing.

SPEAKER_00 32:39

Another interesting one, um, this is a project we did with uh Nova Scotia, and uh they wanted to deploy a new monitoring system for their eMERGE uh departments. So they they sourced these um like telemetry units that would like print that you could see on a on a small device like heart readings, O2 sets, basic uh basic things like this. And their way of implementing it was to put a little probe or like a finger sensor on people in the waiting room at the eMERGE, and then behind uh inside the eMERGE would have these screens that they could monitor maybe riskier patients if they were still out in the waiting room to see if there's any changes in the heart rhythms or rates or anything that they might need to pull them in. So we worked with the um OEM on this one and designed a enclosure that would put four of these uh screens into a single unit that could be mounted on a pole system. So instead of having you know 15 or 20 of these things all over the place trying to keep track of it, it made it into a uniform screen, top to bottom, all labeled by patient and where they were. And you could just look at the screen and do a fast scan and say, okay, everyone's fine, off do your other duties, or come back and see one is lit up red or showing some kind of uh change in status that you would have to go respond to. Um and that was a project then that because they were rolling this out, um, needed these units that we built to centralize all of the these uh these uh screen types and scaled that across most of the emerges in Nova Scotia, right? So like just little little wins like that. They they started to stack and can show you exactly what this technology can do when you apply it in the right way.

SPEAKER_03 34:18

Yeah, these are great examples showing that you guys are kind of the manufactured brains of hospital systems, which usually it didn't exist. It never exists as hospital. I mean, hospital still is not acting as manufacturer per se in this case. You guys are, and they also got the design power from you guys as well.

SPEAKER_00 34:39

Um, right? Is it you're a tool in like the biomeds toolkit? Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 34:45

And so it seems like you're working with hospitals everywhere now in Canada from east to west coast. How do you coordinate all the activities? I know you have a digital platform, but what about the manufacturing hubs?

SPEAKER_00 34:59

Right now, the majority of manufacturing itself happens in our headquarters. So, like we we we do the majority of the work here. We have one auxiliary site in a hospital in Ottawa that does some low volume on-site production if needed. And um right now are in the process of deploying machines into a hospital out in BC. Um, so this will be the like the beginnings of this distributed manufacturing network from coast to coast. So, and and actually, there's a few more machines in the in the another province of New Brunswick. So if you think about that, suddenly what happened was you have one centralized production center. We had to do that for a period of time until you could prove out that you could kind of run remote printing. Um, but then New Brunswick quickly came online, Ontario quickly came online, now BC. And what we're going to start to do in the future, Jenny, is remember, I bring this all the way back to the beginning of our conversation, is we want to teleport. I don't want the hospital to worry about the machines or the materials or the quality systems around it. I want to have all of that managed in the back end of our system so I can just push a print where it needs to go on site, have you know, cameras that are that are monitoring quality, uh temperature uh assessments, maybe having a cross-reference to the actual CAD file for dimension quality, and this would be like a foreign-qualified part. And and I think that's where this gets really cool then, because then it's a hands-off thing for your client. It's simply I need that order, and you walk down the hall and it's there on the machine, right? Like that's that's the the the perfect end state of this. But there's a there's a few um bridges we have to cross to make all that functional, but I think we have the framework already kind of visualized, and we have the key players across the country now where we can start to bridge this gap of us making things to you making things, um, or us making things for you, but just on site.

SPEAKER_03 37:04

Yeah, I mean, this reminds me of uh many, many years. This is not a plug. I'm not asking people to buy this book. I wrote a book a long time ago. Uh-huh. Uh it's from ideal to implementation, talking about creating a 3D printing center in the hospital. It's not just buying a printer. And it's far more expensive than buying a printer. First, the hospital has to allocate labor to just manage the machine and ensure all the quality, all the stuff that you talked about that we wanted to automate. And I've seen companies actually have dedicated engineers on site to manage their own machines, but the hospitals still have to create a room that can house the 3D printer and have the vent if there is fumes. So this is very elaborate. What are your remote uh satellite right now looks like?

Distributed Manufacturing Across Canada

SPEAKER_00 37:57

The the way to do this is no different than how we managed to scale this company in the first place is keep it as simple as possible, right? Like if a hospital expresses interest in in 3D printing, the first thing I will ask is what do you want to achieve? Like what is the purpose, right? If it's you want to make surgical guides and jigs and you want to do pre-surgical planning, instantly you've jumped three classes of machines up into something more complex. If you say, I want to learn how to make a splint for my patient in my OT department, the barrier to entry to that is magnitudes less. Um, if it's a clinical engineering team that just says, you know, I want to make some basic functional FDM style PLA, ABS, TPU kind of parts, no sweat. I'm gonna navigate you straight to a bamboo labs machine, right? Like it's it's just the easiest plug and play thing that can make a good output at the other side. As long as you have the system in place around the part, it's perfectly capable for what you want to do. So I think there's a bit of a needs assessment that goes into what the client is looking for and what the hospital wants to achieve, and then you pair it with the I3D, right? Which is what we have, which is the the catalog of parts, plus all the quality management system, plus the ordering, the general ledger code integrations and all of your approval pathways. Suddenly you go from no ecosystem to a good quality machine, which is the same as one that we use, which means we can almost guarantee similar quality as long as you follow the instructions, right? So so that's that's where the system comes in and allows you to make a part as well as we can make a part. And if all you want to do is not worry about it and just place an order, that's easy enough too. It centralizes in our system, gets pushed to the machines, we make the thing, and we know where you are, so we just send it to you. Like there's there's lots of ways around that.

SPEAKER_03 39:54

So are you guys mostly focusing on extrusion-based 3D printing at the moment?

SPEAKER_00 40:00

I I think again, it's it's you can get so complicated with this in terms of the machine, the material types, and the applications. But this is the sales pitch, and I will do one is that if you can't figure out how to do this with a simple part, you'll never be able to figure it out for a complicated one. So I I always like That's not a saucepan.

SPEAKER_03 40:20

That's really good. I like that.

SPEAKER_00 40:22

Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, but that's that's where we come in, right? It it's it's that foundational layer, that thing that you just need to have in place so that you can begin to grow an ecosystem inside your hospital. And I just just pick off the low-hanging fruit, get really, really good at making a test tube rack. Just like place the order, have it come off, inspect it for quality, low-risk item. If that breaks, fine, replace it. It's not going to harm a patient. Maybe your sample tip's over. That happens anyway, right? So, like, find an innocuous thing, get really, really good at it, but approach it like you're printing an organ, right? What do I need to have in place? And then if you can figure that out when it comes time to implement more complex things, if you want to get into patient-specific things, if you want to get into surgical jigs and guides, if you want to get into bioprinting in the future, at least you have the foundational elements that'll let you get there. And that's that's the big that's the big chasm that I think hospitals are yet to cross is you can think about the big vision and you can deploy a machine, but I promise you, it'll gather dust if you don't have the system behind it.

SPEAKER_03 41:28

Yeah, from a humble beginning. Um But you know, unfortunately, a lot of times when the hot where anyone in the hospital systems think about 3D printing, they immediately jump to 3D printing organ, even though we probably don't even need it.

SPEAKER_00 41:42

Uh at this point in time. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 41:44

I mean, if you cure diseases, then you don't really need a replacement in Oregon. Uh and it just economically is not even feasible, to be honest.

SPEAKER_00 41:51

Um so I I I I kind of skirted your question too. I'll fill in the gap. At this point, yeah, like the F the FDM style printer is is that's our our like workhorses. That's what we use and that's what we recommend. Very uh like recently, um listening to clients and and and new unique needs, we purchased a Form Labs 4BL um machine.

SPEAKER_03 42:12

Yeah, Form Labs is great.

SPEAKER_00 42:14

Great machine. And and it was purely because it allows us to push a little bit deeper into material type, um, end use application. It can be autoclaved, it's more durable. Um there's there's a couple unique cases uh in some biomedical worlds that they just needed the properties that that machine could offer. So when you get enough demand for something, we just don't go buy a machine because it's cool looking. We buy it because it's rationalized to buy it, buy demand signals from the market. And uh I think what you're gonna see coming out of us in the near future is going to be an optimized microproduction package, right? And I think that might look something like maybe you need 10 bamboo labs machines all perfectly networked together. Maybe you need two form labs, four BL machines, maybe you need one insert machine here. And if you have that as a unit, then you'll be able to produce uh at a minimum everything in the polyunity catalog, but also would be able to produce third-party things too. Like if you wanted to host a Sventies or an Active Armor style uh application, these machines are perfect for that job too. So you're getting better bang for your buck when you think about what type of micromanufacturing site you might want to have in your in your hospital setting.

SPEAKER_03 43:33

One quick technical question that we have in our dresses, not just printing, but actually a lot of time after you print, you have to post process whatever that you print. How do you solve that problem? Because I feel like that's a more sticky problem than printing yourself.

SPEAKER_00 43:49

It can be. Um It's one of the earliest design challenges that I think I gave to my first work term student at MonMed 3D was I know it could be impossible for. Some things, but to the best of your ability, design this to come off of a printer functional. And sometimes that is possible, sometimes it just isn't. But if you set out on a design journey for a part, you understand the physical limitations and the way that something has to be made on a 3D printer, you can get pretty darn close to having it come off functional. And if that's just breaking off one piece of support equipment, cool. But most of the things that that we make, ideally, you just take it off of the printbed and it's good to go. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:35

The funny thing is, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

That's that's maybe maybe 10%. There's just no getting around it.

Printer Choices And Simple First Steps

SPEAKER_03 44:41

The funny thing is that there are a lot of innovations, believe it or not, in 3D printing, the new 3D printing process, and you know, you see new new kind of printer comes out regularly. But post-processing technology is actually quite lacking in terms of innovation. It's just something that I found during my research.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

I think you're right. Um and and and it's almost the more laborious part of it. Like if you think of trying to automate production on machines like this, one of the Achilles heels is that there is a bit of manual labor needed. So they're just cycling parts. And I'm sure you've seen automated print farms now where the plate lifts off and the part gets pushed off and the print can restart. I think those kind of solutions are getting better. Um, but you're you're absolutely right. Until we have like uh you know robotic systems or something in place that are going to allow you to do lights out manufacturing where it's able to pull a print, pull supports, do a rinse in isopropyl alcohol, put it in a cure station, you know, do the quality assessment until it gets there. There's always a human in the loop or a couple. And that's a dependency then on your production. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:54

I'm actually gonna have coffee with uh a dento 3D printing company soon, and they claim they can do all these steps actually automatically. I'll let you know, I'll keep you posted on that. So let's talk about uh let's talk about scale, because that's where you guys are right now. Um, how far have you penetrated the Canadian market and how far because it seems like you know you guys pretty much are are everywhere. How how far can you do in in uh in Canada? Can you grow?

SPEAKER_00 46:27

Oh, I I I think having presence in a hospital doesn't represent the capture because what we do has applicability to every department. So you almost have to think about it like sure, there's only like you know, X amount of provinces in Canada, you get 12 contracts, is that game over?

SPEAKER_02 46:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

No. If you there's you know, inside of a province is X amount of hospitals, inside of those hospitals are X amount of departments. And where we do have applicability to every single department in some way, we pride ourselves in designing a solution everywhere from a janitor all the way up to a surgeon or whatever. And uh I think what happens is we we land and expand. So right now we have a few key wedges, one being clinical engineering. You land there or you do a few high ROI jobs for the they love it. You implement a little bit more, you get sticky. Then the lab services department shows up to biomed and they say, How'd you make that thing? Oh, we work at Polyunity. Boom, lab services shows up. Can you make me a lab rack that does this? Can you design something that does that? Then you've you've kind of ballooned in another department. Then OT catches wind that you've made something for lab services, and they go, Can you make standard print like like splints and casts? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Blubble. Then you get OT inside the bubble. So I think what these are like some of our core wedges would be lab services, cancer care, clinical engineering facilities, and OT. And we've kind of sporadically captured one of these departments in all these provinces, but not all of them in all of these um uh provinces. So we have our work cut out for us where we just have to take the footprint that we have already and the traction we have with this department and then scale it up so that it's a full kind of enterprise level thing for that hospital to consume and use. So lots of room to grow yet. We're doing we're doing this in like small digestible projects with very targeted departments across the country, but we have all the rest of the departments in each of these hospitals that we're playing with to get inside the umbrella of uh I3D.

SPEAKER_03 48:35

Just curious, how many projects do you have right now in front of you that you need to figure out?

Post Processing And Automation Limits

SPEAKER_00 48:41

Address one of the one of the coolest ones is um uh it is uh out in BC. And like I said, this is going to be the first version of, at least in my mind, is the uh teleporting medical equipment. So we're outfitting an occupational therapy um department with a printer, all the resources they would need to pull this off, which is a scanner and all the filament, all the materials, the workflows, the software package, and it'll look like this. They scan a limb, comes to us, we process the file, we send it back through our software, and they put it on the machine and print it. So at the end of the day, I want that to be more seamless and have the machine just light up the second we push it to the machine and it'll fabricate. Um, but that's that's that's one that's on the horizon that's really exciting because I think that's a nice package. That's something that if we pull off well, we can take that to any OT team now across the country that we haven't already interacted with and say, hey, do you want this as a as a cool package or an app, right? In our app store will be this scan to print process. So that's one. That's one big one. And and all the rest of these ones, uh the projects are done. We've done commercialization projects, pilots, these kind of things. We're not calling them those anymore. Anything we do now is is early client engagement, early client interactions. The system's proven, it works. We know it does, we have the data. We're we're we've we've crossed that bridge from from pilot project, and now we're a company that's on a push. Um, and uh, I think all of the interactions we have now that that are new, it's just figuring out what the needs assessment is, what they want, and how to deploy it. And that's just our bread and butter at this point in time. Everybody else that we have under contract or as a client, this is just a constant re-engagement. And that's that's one of the most important things about I think doing business and healthcare is the trust thing. So we don't set you up and forget about you. There is constant effort in client success and follow-up and new feature development for you and make sure it gets easier and better and faster and stronger so that like we keep you there and keep you engaged and and you can see the uh the benefits of the uh of the system and the technology.

SPEAKER_03 50:46

You know, I'm I'm really I would just say envious of your position to be able to constantly engage with these different hospital systems and solve their problems. I can see why there will be a moment of uh identity crisis to try to transition from physician to entrepreneur, because I do believe in a way that you're making a much bigger impact. You're affecting much more on a larger scale of people's lives that they didn't even know about. There's not gonna be a thank you after that six blind. Um absolutely.

Land And Expand Inside Hospitals

SPEAKER_00 51:23

But but but not not from some people, but then others will. Like I like that interaction with that facilities and clinical engineering team. When we delivered that product to them, it was like a collective sigh of relief. They were like, Oh my goodness, thank you so much. Like this, this, this will save us so much problem and cost and and headache down the road. So you you get thanks from the right people, but I don't know, it's more of a philosophical question about identity crisis and and ending up in a position like this. And if I really reflect back on it, Jay, it's like you you you imagine what medicine is going to be, like when you're striving to get into it, and then sometimes, like anything in life, like it's just not what you thought it was gonna be. And I don't know what I thought it was gonna be, but it it just I felt like I was built for something a bit different. Medicine adjacent, but still in healthcare. And I and I don't know, I think I just found my home now. Like I relative to me a year ago, I'm a I'm a much happier camper. And I do feel like what I'm doing is impacting the healthcare system. I love being able to be that bridge between clinics and and engineering. I've learned new skill sets that I never would have before if I was just in a in a general family medicine clinic for the rest of my life. And um, I don't know, I could I could eat my words, you know, if all this falls apart and and I'm I'm I'm off trying to find an another thing to do or whatever, but I think you got to follow your gut sometimes too. And and even from the day I started medicine, I knew I was gonna end up here, one way or the other.

SPEAKER_03 52:57

Yeah, that's very sincere, very well said. I I am torn actually between my own work with 3D Hills and my clinical job all the time, is which which should I dedicate more time to? And uh I you know, I hope that we can have another conversation maybe down the line, have another podcast, talk about all the medical applications uh could be a good follow-up episode to talk about when when you when you're there and maybe even expanding into different um verticals of applications. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And we are reaching the end of this hour. I I hope this hour could be longer, but unfortunately we are uh we are reaching the end. Do you have any closing remarks for the next physician founder?

Advice For Physician Founders

SPEAKER_00 53:45

I think if you're juggling your clinic life with a startup, you're going to be faced with a decision point at some time. And I think if you've already started a business or a startup, I think you've already made up your mind is that that's what you would like to do, but it's ripping that band-aid off, transitioning, and reconfiguring what you are or who you are is a really hard thing to do. You gotta be darn sure that that's what you want to do, but the best thing I've ever done is just pick because my brain was being torn in two directions at all times. And I, in retrospect, now know that I was doing both of these things in a very half-baked way. I could have been a much better clinician. Not better, I just mean I could be doing more, getting more involved in, you know, sustaining the system or you know, getting deeper into clinical family medicine, become an academic. I could do more there. But I was also then at at the at the expense of doing more there, not being engaged enough with the company that I started. And I have a responsibility to that too. There's people employed here. Um, I have an executive team that needs help. I have a skill set that would benefit the company if I just had more time. So I think my my my words of advice would be don't be afraid to start that startup. But if you do, you better be ready for that that moment where you have to choose.

SPEAKER_03 55:20

That's very well said. And something for me too, I I think. Well, Stephen, this is a really good conversation. I really enjoyed our hour together. Hope to uh invite you back. But thank you so much for today's episode. Um, and I'll talk to you next time.

SPEAKER_00 55:35

You're very welcome. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_03 55:39

This podcast is for educational and informational purposes only. The views expressed do not constitute medical or financial advice. The technologies and procedures discussed may not be commercially available or suitable for every case. Always consult with a licensed professional.