Project description
Artificial bone graft mimics human bone resilience
Bone grafting is the second most common tissue transplantation worldwide after blood transfusion. There are three sources of bone graft – the autograft (from the patient), the bone bank, and the artificial substitutes. The best option is the autograft because the human bone has high adaptability. However, this transplant is painful and risky, leading to complications in a high number of cases. The EU-funded ADAPTOS project is developing technology that makes artificial bone graft more natural, more resistant and bioactive. The product is already in use in animal clinics and its technology is validated as the best artificial bone graft in the market. The company plans to first target the less complex markets for orthopaedic applications.
Objective
There are 4 million operations performed annually that require a bone graft. This makes bone the second most common tissue transplant in the world, trailing only blood transfusions.
There are three options where to source the bone today. Directly from the patient (autograft), from a bone bank (allograft) or using a substitute. The dominant method today is autografting. This is because human’s own bone is easy to use and offers plentiful regeneration properties.
However, autografting is painful and risky, causing complications in 50% of harvests. This has caused orthopaedic surgeons to regard autografting as a trade-off between sourcing a suitable bone at the cost of a minor disability for the patient.
This is where Adaptos comes in. Adaptos is the only bone graft substitute that mimics bone by being resilient and bioactive. Adaptos gives surgeons the freedom to operate, as they were using autografts, without the drawbacks.
Today, Adaptos is already in use across 9 animal clinics. By collaborating with numerous surgeons, we have validated our technology as the best bone graft substitute on the market.
We will initially enter the synthetic bone graft substitute market valued at €2.1 billion. We aim to penetrate the less complex markets first (animals, craniomaxillofacial & orthopaedic applications). Through these applications, we will build reference cases to meet the high burden-of-proof required to enter the most complex applications (e.g. Spinal fusion).
Our cross-disciplinary founding team will use the SME-project to scale up Adaptos’ production line, build reference cases across 3 hospitals via a multi-country clinical trial and improve our onboarding of orthopaedic surgeons in the process.
Thanks to the SME-project, we estimate that we will reach €17 million in revenue by 2023 while employing 35 high-quality employees.
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Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
SME-2 - SME instrument phase 2Coordinator
33960 Pirkkala
Finland
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.