MARKET INFORMATION

Each year more than 1.100.000 of surgical interventions that require surgical implants are performed in Europe (EU15). Each operation represents a mean expense of 16.000 € with an average expense per implant of 1.900 € and 13.000 € more for hospital care.

A significant amount of these interventions are re-operations needed to repair a unsatisfactory clinical result. A better pre-operation planning will reduce uncertainty and consequently the number of failures implying not only personal tragedies, but also augmented sanitary expenses at European scale.

The next table presents the number of procedures for different anatomic joints carried out in the five European countries with the biggest health budget.

This fact joined to life expectancy that will increase from 19% in 2000 to 24% in 2020 for people aged over 60, has made implant manufacturing an area with major expectations to develop innovative products to enhance the human life quality and reduce risk of failures.

As shown in the following table, perspectives are rather optimistic as the solid growth rate concerns every segment (source: Gouvernement du Québec, 2005):

The orthopaedic market is concentrated around ten big multinational players (Stryker, Synthes-Stratec, Johnson & Johnson, Centerpulse Orthopedics, Zimmer Holding, Smith & Nephew, Biomet, Orthofix, Medtronic-Sofamor and Danek and B.Braun). SMEs in Europe represent here only about 15% of the market, but have a tight relationship with their customers, usually inclined towards innovative designs and experimentation.

In Europe (EU15) there are about 200 small and medium sized implant manufacturing companies. For these companies, product innovation is a slow and expensive process, due to the amount of tests required to check the proper behaviour of new implants. To verify the quality of the designs, the manufacturing companies must perform many laboratory tests to check the mechanical behaviour on physical prototypes, as well as in vitro tests whose costs are very high. All this necessary experimentation prolongs the process of development of new implants and also increases their final cost.

orthoSIM can help engineers with less computing experience to gain a better comprehension of the biomechanical behaviour of instrumented human joints, thus reducing the probability of implant failure by selecting an implant that is more appropriate to the patient's needs. Hereby, more competitive products can be designed and produced by the implant manufacturers, even if they are SMEs with limited resources.