3D Printing News: Printed Sports Guards, Leather TPU & More
By Dynafabs
3D printing news: Align's printed sports mouthguards, TPU filament made with leather waste, an AI that designs bone scaffolds and Protolabs' rebound.
Friday's 3D printing news has a bit of everything: a dental giant printing sports mouthguards, a filament made partly from tannery waste, an AI that designs bone scaffolds in seconds and a school with walls printed on site. Here's our roundup of what's happened since our last news post, with every source linked so you can read the full story.
Align starts printing custom sports mouthguards
Align Technology, the company behind Invisalign, is moving direct 3D printing into a new category. In its third-quarter 2026 results, Align said it is starting a US pilot of the Invisalign Sports Guard, a custom mouthguard printed directly from an iTero intraoral scan. It comes in several thickness options and will be available through participating Invisalign providers.
As 3DPrint.com explains, the usual approach in dental work is to print a model and form the appliance around it. Printing the finished part directly skips that step. On the earnings call, CEO Joe Hogan said the company had developed "a unique resin" with advantages over those used for mouthguards today. No wider launch date has been announced yet.
Leather waste turned into flexible filament
Researchers have blended ground-up leather shavings from tanneries into TPU to make printable filament. According to Bioengineer.org's write-up of a study in the journal *Collagen and Leather*, blends with up to 30% leather by weight printed well, while a 40% blend became too brittle to even wind onto a spool.
The details will sound familiar to anyone who has printed TPU. The best results came at 50 mm/s with the nozzle at 220–225 °C, and faster printing pushed line widths out of tolerance. Adding leather made the filament stiffer, which actually meant fewer feeding problems than with pure TPU. The trade-off was weaker bonding between layers: going from 20% to 30% leather cut the measured layer strength by about half. The researchers see it as suited to semi-rigid parts under low stress, not anything that needs to flex a lot.
An AI that designs bone scaffolds in 12 seconds
3D Printing Industry reports on ScaffoldForge, a generative AI model described in *PLOS One* that designs 3D-printable bone scaffold geometry from target properties in about 12 seconds. The conventional method it was compared with, topology optimisation, takes about 8,400 seconds per design. In simulation, ScaffoldForge's designs came out slightly stronger.
The important caveat, which the researchers stress, is that every result so far is from computer simulation. Nothing has been printed or tested in a lab yet, and the speed-up only applies to the design stage. The code and trained models are on GitHub.
A printed brain implant, a printed school
Two more stories caught our eye:
- A soft implant that cools the brain. FilamentFeed covers a team from IPF Dresden, TU Dresden and the University of Sheffield who printed a 10 x 10 x 3 mm silicone implant that both cools a patch of cortex and records its activity. In a rat model of epilepsy, cooling reduced seizure-like activity. It's an early animal study, not a clinical device.
- A very big printed building. 3Dnatives reports that a school in Qatar with 30,000 m² of 3D-printed walls is nearing completion, with its roof now going on. The builder, UCC Holding, says it's the largest 3D-printed building ever constructed.
The business side: Protolabs bounces back
After a flat year, 3D printing grew again at Protolabs. Its Q3 2026 results show record quarterly revenue of $154.3 million, with 3D printing revenue up 11.4% year on year to about $22.4 million. 3DPrint.com notes that metal printing and HP Multi Jet Fusion led the growth, and the company is adding MJF capacity. Elsewhere on 3DPrint.com, Australia's Aurora Labs is raising A$6 million to expand production of its 3D-printed small turbojet engines.
What it means if you're ordering prints
- Material choice still decides everything. The leather study is a neat reminder that fillers change how a filament behaves: stiffer and easier to feed, but weaker between layers. The same is true of carbon fibre and other blends. Our guide to PLA, PETG, ABS/ASA and TPU covers the basics.
- Printing the final part, not a mould, is spreading. Align's mouthguard is another example of printing being used for finished products, not just prototypes.
- Fit matters. A custom guard only works because it's made from an exact scan. If your part has to fit something, our tolerances guide explains how much clearance to design in.
FAQ
Can Dynafabs print in flexible TPU? Tell us what your part needs to do through the quote page and we'll suggest the right material, flexible or not.
Is Dynafabs connected to any of these companies? No. This is industry news we've read and summarised. Follow the links for the full details from the original sources.
Can you print medical or dental devices? We print parts and prototypes, not certified medical devices. If you're unsure whether your project fits, ask us through the quote page.
Got a design you'd like to hold in your hand? Upload your STL, 3MF, STEP or ZIP at dynafabs.uk/quote. You don't need an account to get a quote.
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