**7. Future developments**

As shown in the Applications section, EBM technology has proved to be a very powerful tool for manufacturing of high added value products. At the same time, EBM is a relatively recent manufacturing technology (first machine sold in 2002) and has much more room for improvement. For both reasons, there are different R&D attempts being performed along the world in order to obtain new findings applicable to new biomedical implants and for supporting the biomedical industry. These attempts are being performed in different R&D areas, such as:


The following advances are not relevant only for biomedical sector but do offer competitiveness to additive manufacturing of medical implants.
