On September 16, Lithoz and KLS Martin announced that patient-specific resorbable implants made from LithaBone TCP, a tricalcium phosphate ceramic, are now an official product on IPS Gate, KLS Martin's surgeon-facing ordering platform, according to the Lithoz press release. The companies say the release positions KLS Martin to reach 500 delivered ceramic implants by the end of the third quarter of 2026. The headline number is a milestone, but the more interesting change is administrative: a ceramic scaffold printed to one patient's anatomy is now something a surgeon orders through a web portal rather than something negotiated as a special project.

From Research Collaboration to Order Form

Lithoz CEO Johannes Homa framed the arc in the release: "What began 12 years ago as a research collaboration with KLS Martin has grown into a proven clinical pathway with scalable solutions." Lithoz, a Vienna-based company founded in 2011, has around 100 employees across four sites worldwide and an export share of almost 100 percent. KLS Martin is based in Tuttlingen, Germany, and focuses on craniomaxillofacial (CMF) surgery.

IPS Gate is described as a web-based platform for planning, ordering and delivering Individual Patient Solutions, or IPS, implants. Adding LithaBone TCP to that catalog means the ceramic option sits alongside KLS Martin's other patient-specific offerings in the same digital workflow. Frank Reinauer, Senior Director of the Division Implant at KLS Martin, says the approach "shortens the path from CT data to a case-specific, tailored-porosity scaffold in a surgeon's hands."

What Is Actually Being Printed

The implants are made with Lithography-based Ceramic Manufacturing (LCM), Lithoz's process, on LCM printers that KLS Martin operates. Per the release, those printers sit within Lithoz's ecosystem, which operates under an ISO 13485-certified quality management system. Lithoz obtained that medical-device certification in 2025 and has held ISO 9001 certification since 2016.

The material is tricalcium phosphate, and the design goal is resorption. LCM allows patient-specific geometries and tailored porosities, and the release stresses that porosity influences how the scaffold degrades and is replaced by newly formed, vital bone. In other words, the printed part is not meant to stay put forever. It is a temporary structure that the body is meant to replace with its own tissue, and the pore architecture is one of the levers controlling that handoff.

Fixation follows the same philosophy. Surgeons can secure the scaffold with titanium screws, or with KLS Martin's SonicWeld Rx system, which uses resorbable polymer pins. The release says the pin option creates an all-around resorbable implant unit that eliminates the need for a second surgery.

Reading the Milestone Carefully

Precision matters here, because the reporting is easy to compress into something stronger than it is. The 500 figure is a forward-looking target, not a completed count. The release says the broader availability positions KLS Martin to reach 500 delivered individual implants by the end of Q3 2026, and TCT Magazine reports the milestone is expected to be reached "in the coming weeks." As of this writing, with the quarter closing on September 30, the 500th implant has been forecast rather than announced as delivered.

The other distinction is between two separate claims. One is that LithaBone TCP implants are an official, standard offering on IPS Gate. That is a product and process statement, made by the manufacturers. The other is that there is a body of clinical evidence behind the approach. 3D Printing Industry notes that the 12-year collaboration has produced multiple clinical studies documenting the safety and efficacy of 3D-printed ceramic bone replacement. We have not independently reviewed those studies, and the release itself presents the pathway as "proven" in the words of its CEO. Treat that as the companies' position, supported by the studies the outlet references.

The Platform Angle

3D Printing Industry adds context that is the outlet's own analysis rather than anything from the release. It frames the announcement as a move away from treating patient-specific resorbable implants as a specialized, research-driven offering and toward a routine digital-ordering product, and it compares the move with 3D Systems' VSP Connect from 2023 and Insight Surgery's EmbedMed platform. That comparison is a reasonable lens, but it is interpretation. What the primary source establishes is narrower: one manufacturer, one ceramic material, one ordering platform.

Still, the structural point holds up on the facts alone. A research collaboration typically depends on a small group of people who know each other, a bespoke design step and case-by-case handling. A web platform for planning, ordering and delivery replaces much of that with a repeatable interface. The quality system plausibly does the same job on the manufacturing side, since a documented ISO 13485 framework is the kind of structure that lets a device be produced routinely rather than as a one-off. That is our inference, not a claim the release makes.

What It Means for Makers

Nobody is going to print a bone scaffold on a desktop machine, and this article is not suggesting otherwise. LCM is a specialized ceramic process, and the certified quality system is as much a part of the product as the printer. But the announcement carries several lessons for people who work with additive manufacturing at any scale.

First, porosity is a design variable, not a defect. The release treats tailored porosity as something engineers specify to control a functional outcome, in this case degradation and bone replacement. Anyone who has tuned infill or lattice density for stiffness, weight or flow will recognize the principle, applied here with much higher stakes.

Second, the material system is the story. The interesting development is not a new printer but a ceramic, a printing method, a fixation option and an ordering channel that fit together. Repeatable results in printing tend to come from constraining the whole chain.

Third, the route from prototype to product runs through documentation and certification. Lithoz was founded in 2011 and certified to ISO 13485 in 2025. For makers thinking about turning a printed part into a regulated or commercial product, that timeline is a useful sobering reference.

Finally, watch for the delivered count. If the 500th implant is confirmed before the quarter closes on September 30, it will be the first hard number attached to a claim that has so far been described in the future tense.

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