The 14-year-old lost his nose in a fire at the age of 9. The accident left the boy with severe facial scarring and a hole for a nose. In June, after a preliminary surgery to expand the remaining skin around where his nose used to be, doctor Tal Dagan (the associate adjunct surgeon at New York Eye and Ear Infirmary of Mount Sinai) arrived in New York City, where he and a team from Oxford Performance Materials created a 3D-printed facial device that would look and function like a real nose.

"This procedure may be a breakthrough in facial reconstruction because the patient will never have to deal with the standard issues of transplantation, such as tissue rejection or a lifetime of immunosuppressive therapies," explained dr. Dagan on their blog. The urgical procedure took 16 hours and is the first of its kind in the U.S..