LLJ supported researcher Saurabh Lal from Leeds University received two awards: One at the ISTA meeting (the principal conference for joint replacement) and one at MEIbioeng which is one of the UK’s largest gathering of Biomedical Engineers, Bioengineers and Medical Engineers.

ISTA meeting: Third prize for best early career E-Poster with Short Talk presentation at the 28th annual congress of the International Society for Technology in Arthroplasty 2015. The title of the short talk was “Biocompatibility of Silicon Nitride Nanoparticles and Cobalt Chromium Wear Debris From THR”. The award was given at the prestigious “Austrian Night” event held at the Vienna Town Hall.

ISTA is a non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of the art and science of joint replacement. Every year they host a congress where the best clinicians, engineers, researchers, and industry members from across the world come together to present and discuss leading works in the field of arthroplasty. In 2015 the conference was held at Vienna (Austria) from Sep 30th till Oct 3rd. It was a successful gathering of over 600 researchers, surgeons and industry members from 36 countries.

MEIbioeng: 1st prize for best osteoarthritis track poster at MEIbioeng15, with the poster titled “Isolation of Ceramic Nanoparticles and Metal Wear Debris from Serum Lubricants under Extremely Low Wearing Conditions”.

MEIbioeng is one of the UK’s largest gathering of Biomedical Engineers, Bioengineers and Medical Engineers, with participants from leading academic centres and the MedTech industry. The event was held at the University of Leeds 7-8 September 2015. The judges for the poster competition were internationally recognised scientists and experts in the areas of biomedical engineering and bioengineering.

Saurabh Lal’s supervisor, Professor Joanne Tipper explains “Current particle isolation methodologies are not sensitive enough to isolate the very low wear volumes produced by modern ceramic ceramic bearings or from ceramic-like coatings, as are being used within the LLJ project. In addition, they are often time consuming, costly and have less than satisfactory recovery rates. Here we have created a method that is 100 times more sensitive, is cost effective, quick and easy to perform. Furthermore, it does not require bespoke equipment and allows recovery of particles for use in biocompatibility studies. We are thrilled that the scientific community has recognised the importance of this work with the award of first prize for our poster presented at the MEI Bioengineering meeting recently”.

Saurabh Lal has been contributing to LLJ WP2 (Biological Assessment of Wear in Silicon Nitride Coatings) and also to parts of WP5 Assessment of Silicon Nitride Coating Performance In Vivo).

The LLJ team congratulates Saurabh and the research team at Leeds on another awarding winning piece of work!

We are happy to report that Maria Pettersson at Uppsala University successfully held her PhD defence some days ago on her thesis ‘Silicon nitride for total hip replacements’.

GRATTIS! From the LifeLongJoints community.

Maria worked on proving some of the base hypotheses of the silicon nitride coatings, such as their good wear resistance, the dissolution of the wear particles, the slower dissolution of the actual coating, as well as looking into the fretting behaviour of bulk silicon nitride in a simulated taper contact. Maria was based at Uppsala University but taking advantage of the LLJ collaboration has done some of her research at the University of Linköping as well as the University of Leeds.

Read more at:
http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:797505