Researchers at IT Sligo are leading a €1 million EU funded project which could pave the way for more people to receive better and cheaper medical implants faster.
The team involved in “Bio-PolyTec” says greater use of bioresorbable polymer material is set to have a significant effect on modern medicine with important benefits for patients and manufacturers.
The main obstacle to wider use of the material has been high processing costs. Now Bio-PolyTec is developing monitoring and control techniques which will speed up processing methods and slash high rates of wastage of the costly material.
Joe Molloy, Technical Director at Innovative Polymer Compounds (IPC), an ISO 13485 Polymer Compounder, said ability to monitor and control the dispersion of additives in a polymer is an important technological development.
As part of the Bio-PolyTec programme, a dispersion measurement instrument is to be developed. This instrument will work in real-time online.
Joe Molloy continues: “Consistently dispersed additives are key for performance in medial implants, but it can be expensive and time-consuming to achieve. With the real-time dispersion measurement instrument that the Bio-PolyTec project aims to develop, Innovative Polymer Compounds (IPC) will much more effectively be able measure product consistency, which enables implants to be developed faster and with improved performance. This adds another competitive advantage to Innovative Polymer Compounds’ (IPC) repertoire.”
The researchers say bioresorbable polymers have key advantages over metal. These include improved patient recovery, fewer follow-up operations and the prospect of new devices and therapies coming on to the market
Being non-toxic and non-metallic, bioresorable polymers have better biocompatibility than traditional implants and break down naturally into the body’s system when they are no longer needed The materials are seeing increasing application in treatment of trauma and sports injuries, including internal bone fixation devices. Project partner, Scaffdex, have developed an innovative bioresorbable product called ‘RegJoint’ for the treatment of osteo and rheumatoid arthritis in the small joints of the hand and foot.
The two-year initiative is funded by the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (EU FP7) for Research and Technological Development.
The project partners are from the UK, Finland, Germany and Ireland. They include academics and polymer processing and biomaterials experts at two universities and staff in three manufacturing firms.
Details of the Bio-Poly Tec project were released today (Wed Feb 12) at the official opening of IT Sligo’s new Centre of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing.
Dr Marion McAfee, the project’s principal investigator, said: “Bio-PolyTec aims to progress the commercial availability of bioresorbable medical implants such as tissue engineering scaffolds and bone fixation screws.
“We are also looking at effectively incorporating bio-active additives into the polymer. These are gradually released as the polymer breaks down inside the body and can help to regenerate the patient’s own tissue.”
Although the material is expensive, ranging from €2k-5k per kilo, it is being used increasingly in implants. Processing methods are complex and slow and entail long and expensive trial and error tests which result in typical “scrap” rates of 25%-30%.
Dr McAfee said: “In many cases this is prohibitive to successful commercialisation of devices. In Bio-PolyTec we will develop novel instrumentation and control technology to rapidly optimise process set-up and reduce scrap rates to a target 5%.”
“We are developing new sensors to detect the quality of the product online during processing - so manufacturers will know straight away if the product is OK or not.”
“The sensors will be based on fibre-optic probes and spectroscopic techniques manufactured by our project partner FOS Messtechnik. We can analyse the composition of the polymer melt in-situ and then feed this data back to optimise the process settings and automatically adjust the process to the required specification.”
Dr McAfee lectures in the Department of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering at IT Sligo and is attached to the Centre of Precision Engineering and Manufacturing.
The new centre’s principal role is as a research and support facility expanding collaboration between the Institute and industry which span the past 40 years.
The other partners in the initiative are:
Innovative Polymer Compounds (IPC) (Ireland), a manufacturer of polymer compounds for the medical industry
Queen’s University Belfast
Tampere University of Technology, Finland
Scaffdex Oy (Finland), which makes bioresorbable tissue scaffolds for treatment of arthritic joints
Fos-Messtechnik GmbH (Germany), which manufacture sensors for the process industry, particularly optic sensors and related technologies
Plasma-Biotal Ltd (UK), who provide bio-active particles for orthopaedic implants.
Corbion Purac (Netherlands), a manufacturer of bioresorbable polymer
Tuija Annala, Managing Director of Scaffdex, said: “Improving the manufacturing process will help us to reduce the cost of making RegJoint. It will also enable us to bring a new product to market. At present, the development and manufacturing costs of the new device are too high for the clinical end use, so patients are missing out on a potential treatment.”