I-Corps: Nanochon, a Commercial Venture to 3D Print Regenerative Implants for Joint Reconstruction

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Acute and chronic orthopedic injuries to articulating joints (knee, shoulder, and hip) typically affect and compromise the structural integrity of cartilage and bone. Current treatments can be extremely invasive, such as total hip and knee metallic implants. Other treatment options focusing on graft tissue, cadaver and synthetic material have had limited clinical success. In addition, a large segment of this population is pediatric. Pediatric patients cannot receive a total joint replacement, and, thus, are confined to less effective graft-based approaches. Another potential segment lies in sports medicine, where our system could repair large and complex injuries quickly and restore athletes to pre-injury levels of performance. The proposed technology would provide an easy-to-use, effective and permanent option while reducing surgical procedure time and patient recovery time. This would in turn provide hospitals and surgeons with a highly viable regenerative device for those patients suffering from advanced joint injury, but who are not viable candidates for total joint replacement. This I-Corps team has developed a highly engineered, patient specific, three-dimensional (3D) biologically inspired implant for treatment of disrupted, unstable osteochondral defects using our previously developed novel 3D printing techniques and nanomaterials. This team proposes to use computer aided design (CAD), along with 3D printing, to fabricate functional 3D osteochondral implants from these advanced nanomaterial composites. We propose to carry out a project in order to optimize the composition of our materials and 3D printed design for manufacture. Participation in the I-Corps and funding provided will further customer discovery, especially in the targeted pediatric and sports medicine customer segments, inform design modifications to the existing proposed prototype and catalyze efforts to generate funding for late stage R&D activities in small animal and large animal models. These research models are essential for final scientific validation and will allow the team to move forward with pursuit of investment from private capital sources and industry partnerships, as well as moving forward with FDA approval.