Resumen

Metallic devices are broadly employed as biomaterials, equating to 70-80% of implants globally, however, there is a critical need to develop devices with minimal failure rates with annual costs of revision surgeries estimated to be $1.62 billion in 2020. Additive manufacturing (AM) has been the lead disruptor in orthopaedic device fabrication as a result of their ability to produce bespoke porous implants to fine tune mechanical behaviour, improve osseointegration, or incorporate secondary materials. Nevertheless, a successful functional orthopaedic device should directly influence the immune response, improve angiogenesis, enhance biomineralization while providing antimicrobial activity. This talk will describe how AM devices can provide biofunctionality across different cellular levels through both alloying and physicochemical post-processing. I will showcase the power of in-situ alloying in Laser Based Powder Bed Fusion (PBF-LB) to produce bioactive alloys followed by the modification of a reduced build volume system and high throughput analysis to enable rapid material screening. In contrast to bulk modification, I will explore the use of laser texturing on hard materials as a surface programming tool while offering Plasma electrolytic oxidation (PEO) as a solution to tackle functionalisation of complex porous geometries. Overall, this presentation offers a glimpse into additional routes to expand the impact of AM in healthcare..

Biografía

Dr Victor Manuel Villapun Puzas is a Research Fellow at the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Institute of Translational Medicine in the University of Birmingham. His vision is to push forwards the boundaries of material science and develop novel functional materials to tackle medical device failure rates, provide customised patient’s solutions and limit antimicrobial resistance in a streamlined pipeline. To this purpose, he has spent the last decade analysing the impact of medical device interfaces and physicochemical properties on both eukaryotic and prokaryotic cells at phenotypic and genotypic levels resulting in over 40 publications and funding from the Royal Society. His first passion is metal additive manufacturing technologies for bioactive device production, while his second area of interest relates to antimicrobial resistance, more specifically on bacterial adaptation resulting from antibiotic and metal dosing. Currently he is part of FractureFix aiming to develop, optimise and test minimally invasive implants to tackle bone fracture of osteoporotic, diabetic and cancer patients using physical joint simulators and 3D-printing.