SMARTPROSYS

Both in human and veterinary medicine, there is a steady increase in congenital and traumatic osteo-articular diseases with a consequent rise in surgeries. Many patients develop post-operative orthopedic infections, typically occurring in the first several days and generally treated with systemic administration of antibiotics. The infections often result in serious complications related to late or ineffective systemic therapies. Moreover, repeated and loosely controlled use of systemic antibiotics has led to marked phenomena of resistance, that accounts for hundreds of thousands of deaths annually. Hence there is a growing need for approaches and strategies, possibly exploiting innovative technologies, to prevent and/or treat postoperative infections and complications.

The project is hence targeted to a new technology for medical applications, aiming at implementing self-protection and anti-infection in next generation orthopedical implants.

The proposed approach aims to design an innovative system (hip joint prostesys) implemented with microchambers filled with drugs that will be released at programmed times and/or on demand after the surgery and/or at the onset of the infection.

The overall concept is to introduce and experiment a paradigm change in providing an efficient smart treatment of prosthetic joint infections that will reduce drastically the use of antibiotics, reducing infections and enhancing the post-operative recovery.