Interview with Matt Wilp from Axial3D

For our final blog, M3Dtek had the pleasure of speaking to Matt Wilp, Director of Customer Success at Axial3D. In our interview we discuss the many applications of 3D printing in healthcare, the benefits and challenges of medical 3D printing, the future of 3D printing in the medical field, and much more!

Q: Could you give us a quick introduction of yourself and provide little bit of your background and your position with Axial3D?

My name is Matt Well, I am director of customer success at Axial3D. I've been in the healthcare industry going on 18 years. I started out really in hospital administration, so position recruitment, affiliate hospital relationships, and developing a quasi ACO for the healthcare organization I worked with, and that was in academic medicine. Then I went into telemedicine consulting for a large telemedicine company in the US, and that kind of got me into the health tech side of the world. I did that for about five years and then went on to doing some consulting for value-based care, which is kind of quality improvement in the healthcare industry – I did that for about two years. And then just recently in March of 2021 I joined Axial3D as Director of customer success.

Q: Could you provide us with an overview of what Axial 3D does?

We are a medical 3D printing company that started in Belfast in about 2016. The company was created as the brainchild of our founder Daniel Crawford when he was in his Post Graduate University work in biomedical engineering. He really kind of saw a need of being able to take 2D images in healthcare such a CT scans and MRIs and turning those into 3D models. So, he developed a proprietary software and that's really kind of our company. When you think 3D printing, we are more of the software behind creating a 2D image into a 3D image. So, he created that kind of in in his bedroom, had a 3D printer and saw the need and Axial3D came out of that.

Q: How did you get your start in medical 3D Printing?

I really have an interest in kind of that start-up environment and medical technology. How I got involved is just previous contacts through other health tech companies I worked with. It's just, it's kind of a smaller world than you think and just got reconnected with some past colleagues and got introduced to Axial3D. I was really interested in the opportunity and the technology they had, and the team is great.

Q: What most excites you about this field?

It's still very new. In the grand scheme of things, especially if you think about it, just in medical care overall. So, I kind of think the sky's the limit really in what can be done. I think 3D printing overall just not even in the medical industry is taking off leaps and bounds and I think we've just only scratched the surface of what can be done in health care.

Q: What does your day-to-day work involve?

My work is not so much on the tech side but more on the customer relationship side. My position is a new role within Axial3D. As we've gone beyond being a UK based company to really becoming a worldwide organization, I've come on board to really bridge that gap of our first touch employees that interact with customers. Just kind of getting them up to speed on processes and things like that and really a lot of my day to day, initially has been developing protocols and practices and standard practices in how we interact with our customers, how we grow our customers, and just really ensure that we're meeting their needs. As we go out of the UK and really work worldwide, we are working with different time zones and different cultures, and if you think about it, one of the largest opportunities in healthcare is always the US market – the work cultures are very different between Belfast and the US—and so I just really kind of teach folks on how to work with those differences and just ensure that we're making the customers happy and giving them the results they need.

Q: What is/are the biggest obstacle(s) in your line of work? Have you been able to overcome them, and if so, what were your solutions?

I would say that the some of the biggest obstacles really in this industry is the technology still very new. So, there's a couple of things that are kind of stacked against new technologies and healthcare. Regulations and reimbursement both typically aren't cut up with the industry yet. It's been like that when I was in telemedicine as well. So really kind of dealing with the changing landscape of regulations, and because it's new technology, getting the appropriate approvals by country and by continent. As well as just working to get reimbursement; different countries have different medical care, and how it gets paid for is different, so navigating that world has been some of the biggest challenges I would say.

Q: What are the main medical applications in which Axial3D uses 3D printing technology?

Really where we are positioned currently is really around taking those 2D DICOM images of CTs, CTAs, MRIs, and turning those into a computer generated, we call them visualizations. So, taking that 2D stack of images and turning them into a computer or 3D animated model, as well as turning those into physical 3D prints. We remain printer agnostic, so we are not directly affiliated are partnered with only one printer in the healthcare industry for 3D printing. We want to get the best product to our customers and there's different benefits to the different technologies that are out there, and we like to remain agnostic to that.

Q: How does the use of 3D printing improve patient care and what are the benefits of 3D printing in the operating room and surgical planning?

The areas that we are really seeing the most benefit now are savings in surgical planning time. It really allows the physician to take not just the 3D model, but all of the different technologies that they use, even the 2D images that we create these models from. So, kind of taking the entire picture, but allowing them to give their hands and eyes a different view of what potentially is going on with this patient. There's a lot of savings and surgical planning time because they get a better idea of how they're going to go in and provide surgery on that patient. It also allows, in a lot of cases shorter operating time on each patient, which, as a result can improve or reduce the length of stay and recovery time of those patients. A lot of times we're seeing it reduce blood loss in the patients. Of course, the more time you're under anesthesia the more recovery time you have etc. So, a lot of that ties into what happens in the OR equates to better outcomes for that patient in the long run. We've seen lower length of stay and improved outcomes. We've even seen instances where physicians may change their course of surgery based off of what they see in the 3D models. It may result in a less invasive surgery, maybe even a more invasive surgery but more accurate surgery, or in some instances, maybe not doing a surgery because after seeing the model live in their hands, they're seeing that what they plan on doing may result in more damage to the patient.

We have a case study on our website right now that in a specific instance, the surgeon was planning on doing a pretty invasive surgery for a brain tumour and after getting the model, found that the tumour was encompassing a couple different anatomies of the patient; originally, he thought that the tumour was just pressing against those anatomies. As a result, he changed his course of surgery, resulting in a significant less peripheral vision loss for that patient, that if they had they done the more invasive surgery, there's no doubt there would have been more peripheral vision loss for that patient. There's a lot of stories like that across the board, but just overall better patient outcomes based off of how they can plan their surgery and some of that is just in the recovery time alone, but some of that is in the long-term outcomes for that patient as well.

Q: Could you tell us about a particularly notable 3D printing project you have achieved during your career?

We are a young growing company. We are not just working with hospitals and surgeons but also with other large health medical device companies in developing hopefully new technologies that will become, over time, the standard of care. We're very young and we've done a lot of great things, but I think the best is yet to come.

Q: What do you think is/are the biggest challenges in 3D printing and bio-printing? What do you think the potential solutions are?

The industry is so new and getting regulatory approval takes longer. Just because there's more to be done to understand the long-term effects. The solution is really more research and development from a regulatory standpoint in this industry. The other big challenge is reimbursement. We're probably at minimum, 12 months away for true reimbursement to be available for 3D printing in healthcare. There's a couple small codes that really don't even cover the costs right now, but really there's big opportunity in reimbursement and the whole regulatory world.

Q: What is your stance about the future of 3D Printing?

3D printing in healthcare, or 3D printing overall, is still very young. If I think specifically in healthcare, I think we're going from using these models in patient planning and patient education but going beyond that to using it within surgical guides and using it with patients specific implantables. I think really that's where the future is. Right now, if we think about implantable devices that are out on the market now, there are some that have become gender specific over time. I think in the next several years we're going to start seeing that go from being gender specific to truly patient specific where they take the scans of the patient and take that and create custom implantable devices for patients.

Q: What advice would you give the next generation of industry professionals looking to get into the field of medical 3D Printing?

I would say that the big advice is keeping an open mind, because this is an ever-changing landscape. So, getting in and thinking this is what you're going to do and that's what you're going to continue to do is probably going to morph over time as the industry matures and as adoption increases across the world. We're just going to see it go from the infancy stages that we are now to who knows down the road. Probably even to the point of custom implantables, and some of that will be based on the printer technologies themselves and the capabilities of what can be created from the resins that they use to print from.