Align Technology now 3D prints Invisalign Palatal Expander directly via Cubicure hot lithography, atop 1M daily aligner components

Align Technology EVP of R&D Srini Kaza described the company's additive manufacturing workflow in an interview, linking iTero intraoral scanners, AI-assisted treatment planning software, and 3D printing into one digital pipeline. Classic Invisalign aligners are not printed directly: Align 3D prints patient-specific tooth models, then thermoforms plastic sheets over them, a process now producing 1 million individual aligner components daily. Align now also prints the Invisalign Palatal Expander directly from intraoral scan data, skipping the mold-and-thermoform step. The Cubicure acquisition added hot lithography, a vat photopolymerization process for high-viscosity photopolymers, as the technical base for further directly printed orthodontic devices.

Align is already the largest production user of vat photopolymerization in medical device manufacturing, and the interview marks a shift from AM as a tooling step to AM as the finished product for select devices. The Palatal Expander shows patient-specific printing scaling past prototyping into daily industrial output, with process discipline and material control flagged as harder than the printing step itself. Hot lithography's higher-viscosity resin handling addresses a known limit of standard SLA/DLP for load-bearing dental appliances. The practical signal is that more Invisalign-adjacent products are candidates for the same indirect-to-direct printing transition.