The world’s first fully 3D-printed microscope blew up in 2025

In early 2025, the pre-publication of an article on a new microscope generated enormous enthusiasm among researchers. It was the world’s first fully 3D printed microscope, manufactured in just a few hours and for a fraction of the usual cost.

Liam Rooney of the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom, who worked on the project, says that after New scientist reported under the microscope, people came from all over the world, from biomedical researchers to community groups and even filmmakers. “The response from the community has been incredible,” he says. The work has now also been published in the Microscopy Journal.

For the microscope body, his team used a design from OpenFlexure, a 3D printing scientific instrument resource available to anyone. They also used a store-bought camera and light source, while control of all parts of the microscope came from a Raspberry Pi computer.

The real breakthrough, however, was that the team 3D printed the microscope lens from transparent plastic – this is what made their microscope both more affordable and more accessible than more conventional devices. Although such microscopes can cost thousands of dollars, creating a new one costs less than £50.

“We’ve had to print about a thousand additional lenses of different shapes since January,” says team member Gail McConnell from the University of Strathclyde in the United Kingdom.

She says several companies that make commercial products requiring lenses have reported on the team’s work, because cheap, lightweight 3D-printed lenses are not at all common in large-scale manufacturing. She and her colleagues tested the microscope by examining a blood sample and a thin section of a mouse kidney, establishing that it could be useful in studies of medicine and biology.

But the team says their goal was to democratize access to microscopes, and make those dreams come true. They are now collaborating with a lab at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana to make microscopy more accessible to researchers and students in West Africa, and they have received grants from the UK’s Institute for Technical Skills and Strategy, Rooney says. They also participate in programs that upskill and empower students facing barriers to accessing education.

Additionally, researchers have integrated the new microscope into the Strathclyde Light Microscopy course, designed for researchers of all experience levels and, according to Rooney, a unique educational opportunity in the UK. “It really changes the way we teach,” he says.

And the 3D printed microscope could get even better. Researchers have worked to improve its resolution without making it more expensive, and they have already figured out how to increase its contrast by up to 67 percent.

McConnell says that because the microscope was designed to be created with accessible consumer electronics and 3D printers, the limits of what it could do in the future and how effective it could actually be depends on the limitations of current 3D printing technology.

“As these printers get better, we will get better: that’s the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not imagination,” she says. “We constantly get emails from people asking us to print something new. »