3D printed sugar offers sweet solution for tissue engineering, device manufacturing

Engineers built a 3D printer that offers a sweet solution to making detailed structures that commercial 3D printers can’t: Rather than a layer-upon-layer solid shell, it produces a delicate network of thin ribbons of hardened isomalt, the type of sugar alcohol used to make throat lozenges. The water-soluble, biodegradable glassy sugar structures have multiple applications in biomedical engineering, cancer research and device manufacturing.