Health and social impact

Health and social impact

Potential health and societal impact

Reduced risk of implant infection and lower need of “revision” surgery will positively impact on patients’ life quality. Besides, for patients whose pathologies have unavoidable fatal outcome, this will allow the prosthesis to outlive the patients, so they would not have to undergo further surgeries in their remaining lifespan. Thanks to patient-specific design of the implant, customization, tailored geometry and nanostructured Hydroxxyapatite and Bone Apatite coatings exhibiting high surface area, a strong and faster bonding of the implant with the surrounding bone will be achieved. This in turn will decrease the number of complications and failures due to mobilization or poor osseointegration of the implants, even in patients with partially compromised bone-regeneration capability. The solutions will be tunable and patient-specific, meaning that different solutions can be chosen depending on the specific vertebral site, surgical procedure, dimension of the gap, and conditions of the patient. The costs for the Healthcare Systems will be significantly reduced, by lowering the number of revisions, the length of hospitalization, the additional prophylaxis procedures and the operative time.

Potential industrial impact

NANO-VERTEBRA prosthesis will be a significant progress, completely recasting devices for vertebral reconstruction, currently at a very early stage of development.
NANO-VERTEBRA approach and technology can be easily transferred to other orthopedic procedures, where the indication is much more frequent, such as joint replacement or dental implants, with hundredth thousands devices implanted per year. Here, the coatings are tested for an extremely challenging surgery, so transfer to other applications is not expected to raise significant issues. From a medical point of view, the surgery is complex, highly invasive and has a long duration, all aspects boosting the infection rate. Possible industrial exploitation scenarios  will be defined within the project both for the European and the Eastern Market.

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