When a person has a rare form of cancer called chordoma, the outcome is generally not good.
Only one in 150,000 people will be diagnosed with chordoma, a rare tumor that can grow anywhere along the spine. Without treatment, those with chordoma suffer a "slow and painful death," Dr. Ralph Mobbs, a neurosurgeon in Australia, told Tech Insider.
But even if it's caught, there's usually little doctors can do, meaning patients are either given a death sentence or go through a complicated surgery that "usually resulted in a poor outcome," Mobbs said.
But Mobbs made history with a revolutionary new surgery that involved 3D printing a new vertebrae for a patient — and it could result in much better outcomes for those suffering from chordoma.
The reason chordoma is so difficult to handle is because even if you remove the tumor, the head is no longer connected to the neck. Doctors usually reconstruct the neck after removing the tumor using bones harvested by the patient's rib or leg, but as we said before, the outcome was generally not good for patients.
But Mobbs took a different approach with a chordoma patient by 3D printing a new vertebrae made of porous titanium.
"The workup was extensive, [about] 3-4 weeks," Mobbs told Tech Insider in an email. "Following CT and MRI scans of the patient, we printed plastic models of the patients' head, neck, and tumor."
Mobbs first practiced the surgery on those 3D-printed models of the patients' head, neck, and tumor. After getting a sufficient amount of practice in, Mobbs 3D-printed the titanium vertebrae that he would implant into the patient after removing the cancerous tumor.
The vertebrae was printed using Australia's only titanium printer, which is located in The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) — the federal government agency for scientific research in Australia.
CSIRO actually 3D-printed a titanium ribcage that was implanted into a cancer patient for the first time by doctors at Salamanca University Hospital in Spain in September.
The chordoma removal was technically very difficult as Mobbs had to operate through the mouth to get to the base of the skull where the tumor was located.
"[That's a] very narrow corridor for the surgeon," Mobbs explained. All in all, it took around 16 hours to complete the surgery.
But the surgery was a success and the patient is currently in recovery. It will take as much as six months for the patient to recover because of the swelling caused by the surgery.
"This is a huge leap," Mobbs said of the surgery's success. "We will be performing custom replacement parts for all sorts of problems, [like] arthritic hips, worn out discs in the spine, new bones after trauma, and the list goes on."
Mobbs' lab is also working on using stem cells to reconstruct organ and tissue that can be combined with 3D-printed foundations. This would allow doctors to "imprint the patients own cells onto scaffolds to reconstruct new organs," eliminating the need for organ transplants, Mobbs explained.
"This will likely happen in our lifetime," he said.
