LightForce's 3D-Printed Metal Braces Finished Their First Patient in 7 Months

The first patient was the company's own VP

When Katie Doran needed braces again in her thirties, her orthodontist laid out a brutal plan: surgery, then roughly 18 months of treatment. She had already spent years in braces as a teenager, wore headgear, and cycled through retainers. Clear aligners during the pandemic had not worked. She essentially gave up on fixing her smile.

Then she became the first person to wear LightForce's fully customized 3D-printed metal brackets.

Seven and a half months later, her braces came off with time to spare before her wedding.

How it works

LightForce's process starts with a digital scan at the orthodontist's office. The company builds a digital treatment plan that maps exactly how each tooth should move. From that plan, it designs and 3D prints a unique metal bracket for every tooth. The brackets are manufactured in-house in Wilmington, Massachusetts. LightForce prints the brackets directly, not molds or castings. Every patient gets a completely custom set.

What the experience was actually like

Doran, who serves as LightForce's Vice President of Physical Operations, already knew the technology intimately. Living through it as a patient changed how she thinks about it.

Her entire treatment required only six appointments, including placement and removal. Follow-up visits lasted 10 to 15 minutes. The orthodontist would pull up her digital plan, swap the arch wire, take a progress photo, and she was done. As a working professional, the time savings mattered.

She also corrected a Class III bite without surgery, which she had not expected. Because the brackets could be placed lower on her teeth, she avoided bite turbos, the small pads orthodontists sometimes use to keep patients from biting directly onto the hardware.

Why custom brackets change orthodontics

Dr. Bryan Lockhart, an orthodontist who has worked with LightForce since its early days, says the shift is similar to earlier leaps in the field. Orthodontists once bent nearly every wire by hand. Later, brackets with built-in prescriptions simplified things. Personalized brackets are the next stage.

With traditional braces, every patient gets the same brackets. Orthodontists then spend months bending wires and repositioning hardware to compensate. Custom brackets move that fine-tuning upstream into the digital plan. The details are already built in before the patient ever sits in the chair.

That also speeds up the first appointment. Instead of bonding each bracket individually, orthodontists use a custom tray that positions all the brackets at once.

Doran points out that most patients do not care how the brackets are made. They care about the result. But the manufacturing method is what makes a fully custom metal bracket possible at all. Traditional mass production cannot give every patient a different bracket shape. Additive manufacturing can.