From 3D-Printed Medical Innovations to Clean Energy Solutions

Joseph DeSimone’s lab is well known for their ultra-precise 3D printing technologies that underlie the design and fabrication of complex polymer structures. The lab’s digital manufacturing platforms have enabled innovations in medical devices, drug delivery systems, and next-generation vaccine technologies through processes such as continuous liquid interface production (CLIP) that can produce up to 1 million 3D-printed particles per day.

Joseph DeSimone, PhD

These established digital additive manufacturing systems can print features as narrow as 10 microns and scale production to industrial-relevant volumes. Despite being originally developed to push the limits of micron-scale structures for biomedical applications, that precision has opened unexpected opportunities into other interdisciplinary avenues.

With support from the Stanford Doerr Sustainability Accelerator, graduate student researchers like Philip Onffroy, Knight-Hennessy scholar and PhD student in the DeSimone lab, are applying the lab’s processes to address global sustainability challenges.

Through collaborations with researchers at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the DeSimone lab is exploring how their 3D-printed latticed capsules perform in inertial confinement fusion reactors (ICF reactors), which initiate nuclear fusion reactions by using lasers or particle beams to compress and heat fuel pellets to extremely high temperatures.  

This shift reflects a broader trend in the DeSimone lab toward interdisciplinary impact. Lab members like Philip Onffroy are designing micro-architected carbon electrodes that promise to enhance not only medical and imaging technologies, but next-generation batteries, reactors, and systems that could power resilient, low-emission energy infrastructure – demonstrating how medical research can ripple outward to address some of the planet’s most pressing technological challenges.

A high-resolution polymer 3D printer in the DeSimone Lab. (Image credit: Jacob Dobson)

The team prints capsules that look like black peppercorns for nuclear fusion and fission fuel containment. (Image credit: Katie Jewett)

A capsule's ornate, geometric patterns dictate material properties like conductivity and heat transfer. (Image credit: DeSimone Lab)

Microscopy images of a carbon structure with an octet lattice architecture. (Image credit: Philip Onffroy)

Joseph DeSimone, PhD, is the Sanjiv Sam Gambhir Professor of Translational Medicine and Chemical Engineering at Stanford University. He holds appointments in the Departments of Radiology and Chemical Engineering with courtesy appointments in the Department of Chemistry and in Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

This story has also been covered by the Stanford Report, Doerr Sustainability Accelerator, and Knight-Hennessey Scholars program.