Reaching-out into year three

Reaching-out into year three

September 25, 2015

September is a notoriously busy month for outreach and engagement in the academic calendar and 2015 has been no different!
 
We’ve published our second annual review: highlighting further achievements from the EPSRC Centre for Innovative Manufacturing in Medical Devices. This 28 page summary of activity is broken into three chapters: Delivering a national centre; research challenges;  and research in application.
(Read it by downloading the PDF or request a printed copy).
 
We sponsored five events to make new academic, clinical and industrial contacts and to promote the work of the Centre:

  • MEIbioeng15 brought together over 250 delegates from the former Centres of Excellence in Medical Engineering in the UK (funded by Wellcome Trust and EPSRC from 2009); The Bioengineering Society; Regener8; and delegates from leading academic centres and the Med Tech industry. The two-day conference was held at the University of Leeds.
  • The biennial international PPE conference ran in conjunction with the UK-China Advanced Materials Research Institute Research Workshop – a key collaboration between the UK and China in advanced materials for healthcare, and the British Science Festival. In addition to sponsorship, a half-day of presentations was devoted to the work of MeDe Innovation, with a presentation from each co-investigator
  • The 2015 BORS annual meeting was held on 14 September in Liverpool. Sessions included musculoskeletal soft tissue engineering, bone regeneration, and preventing and treating infection around orthopaedic implants.
  • The BOA Annual Congress, 15-18 September in Liverpool attracted over 2000 clinical members of the British Orthopaedic Association. MeDe Innovation presented live demonstrations of our research into ‘manufacturing at the point of need’ – 3D printing in order to support the in-clinic manufacture and configuration of bioactive devices for large defects which are load bearing, functionally gradient and biologically enhanced.
  • The fourth EPSRC Manufacturing the Future Conference held at the University of Cambridge on 17 and 18 September 2015 attracted over 250 of the UK’s leading academics, industrialists and senior government representatives to discuss how new research and government programmes can support the needs of the UK’s key manufacturing sectors.

 
We’ve been working on several feature articles: look out for them in Business Quarter Magazine to be published early October; and in the British Industry Review Yearbook, to be published later in the year.
 
We’re hosting our second guest lecture at the University of Bradford on 30September. Professor John Fisher from the University of Leeds will present on ‘The role of stratification in future developments of medical devices’.