Job description
Owing to its superior mechanical, biocompatible, and biodegradable properties, polylactic acid (PLA) has been largely employed to fabricate bone implants. As the PLA implants will slowly degrade over time while the bone is regenerating, a surgical removal of the implant is not needed. However, matching the degradation speed to tissue regeneration, while ensuring excellent mechanical properties is still challenging, and hence composites, potentially including bioactive components, would offer an ideal solution. Recently, we have shown that composites consisting of PLA and colloidal particles, namely hydrotalcites (HTCs), are promising candidates to fabricate implants because of enhanced mechanical properties of the PLA-HTC composite, and the controlled release properties from HTCs. Although, both materials are already approved for clinical use, the implementation of this new approach at large scales and making it clinically applicable, requires more efforts.
In this project UMCG (medical faculty), FSE (Science & Engineering), Polyvation, ELBO Technics and Kisuma Chemicals join forces in order to: i) develop PLA/HTC composites production using a large-scale extrusion-based compounder; ii) assessing the mechano-structural properties of PLA/HTC composites with varying HTC content; iii) control of the degradation profile as a function of the PLA/HTC composition; iv) identification of the operating conditions for the fabrication of precisely-controlled prototypes via injection molding and 3D-printing, fulfilling the same specifications of the state-of-the-art implants; v) introduce regenerative bone formation via bone morphogenic drug-loaded HTCs.
This project aims to deliver novel PLA-based bone crews and plates, ready for clinical translation, along with a detailed strategy for a large-scale production.