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[October 2007]
Prestigious Award for Amedica’s Silicon Nitride Ceramic Bearing Technologies
Amedica Corporation (Salt Lake City, UT, USA), an orthopaedic implants company focused on silicon nitride ceramic technologies, has announced that a paper it presented on the in-vitro testing and evaluation of its silicon nitride ceramic bearings for total hip arthroplasty won the HAP Paul Award from the International Society for Technology in Arthroplasty (ISTA). The prestigious HAP Paul Award, which was presented to Amedica at ISTA’s 20th Annual Congress, held from 4-6 October 2007 in Paris, France, is given for outstanding research in new technology for joint replacements.
The award-winning research paper, ‘In Vitro Performance of Silicon Nitride Ceramic in Total Hip Bearings’, will be published by ISTA as a special article in the Journal of Arthroplasty. The paper demonstrates that Amedica’s MC2 TM silicon nitride based ceramic bearings, being developed for reconstructive hip, knee and spine implants, have the combination of strength, toughness and wear resistance characteristics that may overcome the limitations of currently available bearings.
The paper was authored by a team led by Ashok Khandkar PhD and included B Sonny Bal MD, University of Missouri, Columbia; Dr Aaron Hofmann MD; University of Utah; Dr. Ian Clarke PhD, Loma Linda University; Dr Alan Lakshminarayanan PhD, Amedica; and Mohamed Rahaman PhD, University of Missouri-Rolla.
The team of collaborators compared the fracture strength and in-vitro wear characteristics using hip simulators of Amedica’s Micro-composite Ceramic, or MC2, bearings with current state-of-the-art bearings. The data presented at ISTA’s Annual Congress demonstrated that the silicon nitride femoral heads had substantially greater burst strength than similar 28mm femoral heads made using the strongest commercially available ceramic.
“We are delighted and honored to win the HAP Paul Award for our work,” said Ashok Khandkar, CEO of Amedica Corporation. “This paper demonstrates the inherent strength and wear resistance advantages of silicon nitride ceramics compared with the current generation of ceramic orthopedic implants. We are pleased that a group of our peers has selected our research on silicon nitride ceramic and recognized the important potential of this material for total hip arthroplasty. Importantly, we believe independent recognition such as this award, will increase awareness of silicon nitride and support its future use in orthopedic applications such as ceramic bearings for joint replacement.”
ENDS