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Latest News: ... Latest Story Further Information: UMIP - Case Studies of Spin-outs
UPF Masterclasses: December 1st 2009 March 31st 2009 November 25th 2008 UPF Masterclass Hall of Fame |
05/08/10 MTI Investee APATECH wins prestigious Large Deal of the Year award at 2010 Vitesse Media Awards 24/05/10 UPF increases investment in Arvia Technology 12/05/10 UPF Invests in University of Manchester med-tech spin-out, BiOxyDyn 28/04/10 UPF leads £1.15m investment round in PowerOasis 01/03/10 MTI has largest ever exit by selling investee company APATECH for $330m 22/02/10 Ai2 Limited announce appointment of new CEO 18/02/10 Nano ePrint partners with Novalia to deliver printed electronic greeting cards for Tigerprint 03/02/10 UPF leads £2m investment round to help bring new pest control products to market 23/01/10 UPF investee MYCONOSTICA launches Pneumocystis diagnostic kit in Europe and Canada 22/01/10 14/01/10 NWDA awards £9m Transitional fund to MTI 30/11/09 MTI & NWDA boosts Manchester hi-tech spin-out 13/11/09 Award winning week for the UMIP Premier Fund’s investments 26/10/09 22/10/09 UPF Invests half a million in CABLESENSE - North West hi-tech specialists back Lancaster busines 07/09/09 UPF Investee MYCONOSTICA attracts £1.7m in Series D financing to progress its fungal diagnostics 05/09/09 UPF Investee ARVIA TECHNOLOGY named in Global Cleantech 100 company listing 05/09/09 ‘Proud parents’ celebrate 25th birthday of breakthrough technology 09/07/09 UPF Investee ARVIA TECHNOLOGY wins major North West Innovation award 29/06/09 UMIP scoops Business Impact Award 19/03/09 Breakthrough research by University student could speed up the recovery of injured athletes. |
Damaging a tendon can be one of the most common and frustrating injuries for an athlete - often forcing them to stay away from the sportsfield for up to eight weeks. But now the pioneering research of a University of Manchester student could be about to speed up the recovery process. Grafting a tendon from another part of the body creates a second site in the body that needs to heal. And the alternative of enforced rest for a number of weeks can be unpopular, especially for those who are committed to their sport. Lucy says that using the artificial tendon would take away the need to operate on a second site in the body, which speeds up the recovery time. And she believes the alternative approach would be of particular interest to athletes - amateur and professional - who are keen to speed up the time it takes for tendon injuries to heal. Lucy is about to start the pre-clinical stage of her artificial tendon research. And she says they could be used in hospitals in less than three years. "Tendons have a poor healing response," said Lucy, who is part of the School’s Biomaterials Group. "If you damage them they often don’t heal back to their original strength, you do get a lot of scar tissue and you can have ongoing pain. The way they are treated at the moment is with a graft where tendon is taken from somewhere else. But this creates two sites of injury or if you have a graft from someone else there is a chance of rejection. With ours it would just be a one-off surgery - that you could even have as a support mechanism before a tendon was to rupture. We are increasingly focusing on early sports injuries. Football and rugby players have a lot of tendon injuries and they really want to reduce their rehabilitation time. They don’t want to be sitting around for six weeks waiting for it to heal." Lucy creates the artificial tendons with a bio-polymer, which is a degradable polymer than can be used inside the body. She has developed a method of adapting the polymer fibres to a structure that’s similar to tendon tissue and mimics natural tissue. So far the project has benefited from an investment from the UMIP Premier Fund (UPF), managed by technology Venture Capital specialists, MTI Partners. Now the virtual research centre regeNer8 has made a grant of £50,000 to the University so that Lucy can continue with her research. Professor Sandra Downes, from the School of Materials, said: "This is a major breakthrough, because currently there is no clinically available artificial tendon scaffold. This research is leading edge. And it is a major achievement for a PhD student to come up with something so significant. Our work in this area should lead to significant benefits for patients with tendon injuries in the future and we are pleased that this has been recognised by regeNer8." www.manchester.ac.uk/materials
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