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Country of origin: Italy

Summary

An Italian University research laboratory has developed designs of internal knee prosthesis. These designs allow the replication of the relative motion between tibia and femur quite well since they rely upon mechanical guided connections between them instead of the residual anatomical structures (such as ligaments, muscles, soft tissue) after the surgical implantation of the prosthesis, like most of the existing prostheses do. They are looking for license agreement and industrial development.

Full description

Actual knee prostheses are made of several elements which roll and slip one on the other. These elements are generally obtained as a more or less faithful replica of anatomic components. The main drawback of this strategy is the impossibility to adapt a prosthesis on a certain patient: just a very few parameters can be set by surgeons. In other words, it is impossible to replicate the anatomical structures of a particular patient: the motion of the prosthetic knee is guided by elements obtained from mean experimental values. Thus, many existing prostheses have been defined from a certain mean articulation. As a consequence, the accuracy of the motion of the prosthetic knee (with respect to the original one) is tendentially low on a generic patient. Moreover, the sleeping between prosthetic components makes sure that the life of existing prostheses is not particularly high. Post-implant surgical operations are thus often required in order to substitute the damaged mechanical components of a prosthesis.The invention aims at providing some designs of internal knee prosthesis.

The proposed designs allow the replication of the relative motion between tibia and femur quite well since they rely upon mechanical guided connections between them instead of the residual anatomical structures (such as ligaments, muscles, soft tissue) after the surgical implantation of the prosthesis, like most of the existing prostheses do.

Innovative Aspects

The proposed designs make possible the following:
- an accurate replica of the articular motion;
- a total or partial (according to the chosen design) reduction of surface slipping;
- simpler mechanical designs, which make it possible to adapt many parameters of the prosthesis on a particular patient;
- using contact surfaces which have a relative motion of pure rotation during the knee flexion thus avoiding slipping contact motion, thus avoiding the major drawbacks of the slipping friction effect, that is, the surfaces wear,
- reducing the loads on the prosthesis components, thus improving the life of the prosthesis itself and reducing the possibility of a further surgical operation;
- using lower cost materials with respect to those necessary in the existing prostheses. This makes possible to simplify the manufacturing process and reduce the overall costs.

Partner expertise sought:

- Type of partner sought:
Industry

- Specific area of activity of the partner:Health, Mechanical Construction Engineering

- Task to be performed by the partner sought:Industrial development of the invention

Listed under: Medicine/healthcare/veterinary \ Biotech, Pharma and Cosmetics

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Key dates Profile created on: 01 February 2010 Closing date: 07 January 2011

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