| Project Detail |
Self-feeding bone implants Bone implants play a crucial role in the medical industry, but their high failure rate increases healthcare costs and diminishes the quality of life of patients. One major challenge is maintaining the viability of large living tissues. Recent research has shown that glycogen can support long-term implant survival, promote tissue formation, reduce inflammation, and improve vascularisation. The ERC-funded NutriBone project aims to address critically sized bone defects by developing a self-feeding bone implant. The project will focus on significant bone defects and work towards creating a minimum viable product, a certification roadmap, market research, and a business plan. The concept of self-feeding suggests that tissues should generate their own nutrients when the surrounding environment cannot provide them. Keeping large (>1cm3) living tissues alive is an unresolved key challenge that hinders many clinical and industrial applications, including tissue/organ transplants, engineered tissues, drug screening models, and lab grown meat. While natural tissues within our body are continuously provided with nutrients via the blood stream, engineered, explanted, or even implanted tissues have to rely on the slow diffusion of nutrients until perfused vascularization is achieved. This commonly leads to tissue starvation, which inevitably causes tissue failure. The NutriBone project is based on the logical yet never before explored premise that these tissues need to provide their own nutrients if the environment cannot do so. This is an innovative concept named self-feeding. We have surprisingly discovered that glycogen offers cell-driven long-term release of physiologically relevant quantities of glucose enabling long-term implant survival, accelerated tissue formation, reduced inflammation and immune responses, and improved vascularization. As this approach is a first-of-its-kind, we have patented it and here propose its valorisation. We propose to develop a marketable self-feeding bone implant to address the current clinical challenge of critically sized bone defects. Although our technology is relevant for many clinical applications, we will focus on large bone defects. Bone is the second most implanted tissue but implant failure remains high, leading to high medical cost and low quality of life for patients. Moreover, bone implants represent the largest, and still fast growing market for engineered tissues, while awaiting a solution to maintain implant viability. Thus, we can foresee a concrete path-to-market. To this end, we will perform product development towards a minimum viable product, establishing a roadmap for certification, and market research as well business plan development to ensure a good product-market fit including a market entry and exit strategy. |
