Katie Weimer, a biomechanical engineer based mostly in Colorado, was challenged by her mentor to assume greater — to use advances in regenerative drugs to “improve the future of mankind.”
That problem offered a spark in Weimer. She considered her mom who died of breast cancer on the age of fifty when Weimer was simply 15 years outdated.
All these a long time later, Weimer’s mother has by no means been too removed from her coronary heart. With advances in regenerative drugs and lab-created biotissue, Weimer had an thought on how to convey hope to breast cancer survivors world wide.
What if there was a manner, she puzzled, to 3D print bio-friendly breast tissue materials that might restore dignity to survivors after a lumpectomy, the focused elimination of the cancerous tissue?
“The reality is so many women must live with a reminder of the cancer they had every single day,” Weimer, 43, stated. “That is just not adequate. There should be a greater manner.
“My team and I believe every woman has the right to get a breast reconstruction after cancer treatment — one that allows a woman to be whole again.”
She additionally stated girls deserve an implant that doesn’t “come with an FDA box warning,” a stringent security discover the US Food and Drug Administration places on present implants warning of potential cancer dangers.
More than 300,000 women within the United States are recognized with breast cancer yearly, in accordance to the American Cancer Society. It stays one of the widespread — and deadliest — cancers in girls, claiming the lives of about 40,000 girls yearly. Worldwide, an estimated 2.3 million girls are recognized with breast cancer, with almost 670,000 dying from the illness yearly, in accordance to the World Health Organization.
For most, remedy requires a lumpectomy or a mastectomy, the elimination of all of the breast. Some 170,000 lumpectomies are carried out within the US yearly, and about 20% of ladies want to bear a second process.
Even when the cancer is eliminated by lumpectomies, the breast is commonly left completely scarred.
“Sadly, the standard of care is to treat the disease, but not the deformity,” Weimer stated. “Doctors do a good job of removing the cancer, but unfortunately women are left with a divot in their breast. And it has huge psychological impacts on survivors.”
Seeking to discover a higher manner, Weimer launched her Colorado startup, GenesisTissue, in 2024. The resolution she and her staff devised: Build 3D-printed breast-tissue “scaffolds” produced from superior, cell pleasant bioprintable supplies that the physique received’t reject. Surgeons would extract a affected person’s fats cells by means of liposuction, inject these cells into the scaffold, and as soon as implanted these cells develop into pure tissue.
“The ideal solution would be to implant the scaffold at the time of cancer tissue removal,” Weimer stated. “The scaffold protects the injected fat graft from the pressures and forces of the breast and restores the breast’s shape.”
This reconstruction, Weimer stated, would permit a affected person’s physique to heal itself, from its owns cells, and the scaffold would disappear over time, permitting a survivor to grow to be “whole again.” It might additionally permit breast surgeons to play a task within the reconstruction, she stated, past eradicating the cancer.
Every case can be personalised to every particular person affected person with laptop scans offering precise specifics in regards to the tumor measurement, then that information can be despatched to a 3D printer to make the biofriendly scaffold.
“It’s pre-planned and pre-sized to fit the patient. We’re not taking an off-the-shelf component and forcing it to fit,” Weimer stated. “There’s no long-term rejection risk, no worrying about this foreign object in your breast. You’re just left with your own tissue.”
Her know-how isn’t commercially obtainable but. Benchtop information and preliminary preclinical information have proven promising outcomes that she hopes will lead to medical trials.
“At Genesis Tissue,” she stated, “we are working every day fighting for breast cancer survivors and their right to a breast reconstruction that regenerates into their own breast tissue — and lasts a lifetime.”
There presently are two forms of breast implants permitted for sale within the United States: saline-filled and silicone gel-filled. The Food and Drug Administration in 2020 issued a boxed warning about how “breast implants are not considered lifetime devices” and “breast implants have been associated with the development of a cancer of the immune system called breast implant-associated anaplastic large cell lymphoma.”
Weimer stated her private mantra is that the medical discipline ought to “stop implanting industrial materials in human breasts,” particularly at a time when the sphere of bioprinting and regenerative drugs is making large strides in affected person care.
Breakthroughs lately have included a affected person in South Korea receiving a landmark 3D-printed windpipe constructed from cartilage and mucosal lining in 2024. At the University of California San Diego, researchers are developing “functional, patient-specific livers using 3D printing.” Researchers at Penn State University in 2025 obtained a $3 million federal grant to use 3D printers to “use living cells and biomaterials to build tissue-like structures.”
In the breast tissue area, Harvard researchers have been finding out methods to make the most of 3D printing to make vascularized tissue for breast reconstruction, as have researchers on the French medtech firm Lattice Medical and Australian innovator Anand Deva.
Weimer acknowledges she’s not the primary researcher on this area. She believes all of them — scientists, engineers, researchers — are in a shared race of kinds as a result of the demand and want are so vital.
“It’s a movement now,” she stated.
Weimer has been on the forefront of superior surgical planning and anatomical modeling, using 3D printing since 2007, first at an organization referred to as Medical Modeling after which at 3D Systems. As a biomechanical engineer, she has helped information surgeons in numerous surgical procedures, printing fashions that offered higher accuracy within the working room and improved sufferers’ lives. The most well-known case she labored on was the 27-hour separation surgical procedure of Jadon and Anias McDonald, twins born conjoined on the head, documented by NCS in 2016.
Dr. Oren Tepper, the famend plastic surgeon who was the lead on the twins’ case, has recognized Weimer for 20 years and has labored together with her on a number of surgical procedures.
“She’s one of the most talented biomedical engineers I’ve ever met,” stated Tepper, an affiliate professor of cosmetic surgery at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and a specialist in 3D surgical innovation and tissue regeneration. “She’s the perfect person to lead this front. Her expertise is not just in 3D printing, but the application of this technology in a way that truly translates into the operating room and patient care.”
Like most groundbreaking medical applied sciences, the most important hurdles at this level stay the regulatory course of to get FDA approval. Rigorous testing and analysis proceed, however Tepper stated the know-how Weimer is engaged on can be a “game changer” on the earth of breast reconstruction.
Weimer was mentored by Charles Hull, the inventor of 3D printing and chief know-how officer of 3D Systems, the corporate he based in 1986. He inspired Weimer and different engineers in 2021 to push the bounds of invention — to use their mind to serve humanity in an enormous manner.
At 86, Hull stated he’s proud that Weimer heeded his name. He’s not shocked, he stated, as a result of “she’s made a career out of helping people.”
“As the father of 3D printing,” Hull informed NCS, “it has been an honor to see an engineer of Katie’s caliber take my initial invention and utilize it in a new way to hopefully benefit women around the world in the not-so-distant future.”
When and if that point comes, Weimer believes she can have honored the mother she misplaced far too early, the lady whose knowledge and steerage she has longed for since her loss of life in 1998.
“Her life, her illness, and her selflessness as a human are a big reason why I believe innovation matters,” she stated. “Only now, nearly 30 years later, can I look back and see how her cancer journey affected my career.”
Losing her mother was “such a transformative moment;” Weimer now hopes her journey ends in transformative change for girls in every single place.