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Text: Thomas Masuch
Dental appliance manufacturing relies on 3D printing more than almost any other industry. Standard practice for retainers and aligners starts with a digital scan of the mouth. A resin model is then printed, washed and cured, ready to pressure form the appliance. It’s estimated this industry produces 1.1 million resin models per day*, most of which end up in landfill.
UK startup Fyous’s novel approach uses thousands of reconfigurable pins instead of resin to produce the same thermoformed appliances without producing any model waste. The system is called Ghost and will make its live debut at Formnext 2026.
Fyous’s proprietary technology, PolyMorphic Moulding, digitally controls the position of thousands of pins to form temporary shapes in minutes. Ghost makes one fundamental change to the existing workflow for dental appliances by skipping the printing, processing and discarding of the model. According to Fyous, the rest remains largely unchanged.
The process starts with an STL or OBJ file, which is processed by Fyous’s PinPoint control software. This converts the file into F-code, which then configures the pins into a negative version of the patient’s arch that acts as a temporary model for the pressure forming step that follows. A standard PETG, EVA or PU thermoform blank is then heated and pressure formed over the pins before the appliance is stored for collection. The pins then reset and the process automatically starts on the next file in the batch.
The multi-axis pin array consists of 20,000 individual pins, each 300 microns in diameter, with positions accurate to within 100 microns. This produces appliances that are dimensionally equivalent to or better than those formed over a 3D printed model. As there is no physical model, quality control is verified digitally against the source file. The full cycle time is approximately 5 minutes including pin configuration and forming. A single machine will produce up to 180 appliances per batch, with an annual capacity of around 60,000 appliances, taking changeover times and servicing into account.
Fyous has raised over £3.5 million in investment so far and is backed by former Envisiontec CEO Al Siblani and Stratasys co-founder Scott Crump. The company reports that it has secured £1 million in pre-orders for Ghost. Josh Shires, CEO & Co-Founder: “We’ve spent 6 years in R&D with PolyMorphic Moulding. Ghost is the culmination of that work.”
*Estimated from ~4.5 million annual clear aligner case starts (Straumann, 2021) and a median 47 aligner stages per arch including refinement (Meade et al., Journal of Orthodontics, 2023); cross-checked against Align Technology's disclosed 2025 case volume.
Further information
Fyous at Formnext 2026: Hall 11.0, Booth F22
