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

At the beginning of 2025, a preprint of an article about a new microscope caused a huge stir among researchers. It was The world's first fully 3D printed microscopemade in just a few hours and at a fraction of the usual cost.

Liam Rooney from the University of Glasgow in the UK, who worked on the project, says that after New scientist reported on the microscope, they were contacted by people from all over the world, from biomedical researchers to community groups and even filmmakers. “The reception from the community has been incredible,” he says. Work is now also underway published in Journal of Microscopy.

For the microscope body, his team used a structure made from OpenFlexurewhich is a resource about scientific 3D printing tools that anyone can access. They also used a store-bought camera and light source, and controlled all parts of the microscope from a Raspberry Pi computer.

However, the real breakthrough was when the team 3D printed it. microscope lens made of clear plastic – this is what made their microscope more affordable and accessible than more traditional devices. Although such microscopes can cost thousands, it costs less than £50 to build a new one.

“We must have printed about a thousand more lenses in different shapes since January,” says a team member. Gail McConnell at the University of Strathclyde in the UK.

She says several companies making commercial products that require lenses have approached her team because cheap, lightweight 3D-printed lenses are not at all common in large-scale production. She and her colleagues tested the microscope by examining a blood sample and a thin section of a mouse kidney and found that it could be useful in medical and biological research.

But the team says the goal of their work was to democratize access to microscopes, and those dreams are coming true. They are now working with a laboratory 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 British Institute of Technical Skills and Strategy, Rooney says. They also participate in programs that upskill and empower students who face barriers to education.

In addition, the researchers introduced a new microscope into Strathclyde Optical Microscopy Coursewhich is designed for researchers of all levels of experience and, according to Rooney, represents a unique educational opportunity in the UK. “It really changes the way we teach,” he says.

And there is room for the 3D printed microscope to get even better. Researchers have been working to improve its resolution without making it more expensive, and have already figured out how to increase its contrast to 67 percent.

McConnell says that since the microscope was designed to be built using consumer electronics and was affordable 3D printersthe limits on how much it can do in the future and how well are actually due to the limitations of current 3D printing technology.

“As these printers get better, we'll get better: that's the bottleneck. The bottleneck is not imagination,” she says. “We get emails from people all the time asking us to print something new.”