Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
Bone-repair surgery transformed: Magnesium’s in; titanium’s so last season.
A new magnesium-based metal implant is disrupting the traditional titanium-based-plates market worldwide. It’s eliminating the need for secondary surgery, dramatically lowering infection risks, and promoting quicker bone healing. It has an almost magical property, previously unheard of by orthopaedic surgeons and patients, that renders it invisible once healing has taken place.
TTHE QUOTE ABOVE by Charles Blow, author of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, is him talking about recovering from his troubled adolescence and going on to thrive. If taken literally, though, it could easily be applied to a recent major disruptive breakthrough in biomedical technology that accelerates and improves the healing of serious fractures, with fast-growing children and adolescents being the biggest beneficiaries.
‘I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.’
Quotes are too often interpreted as truisms, however, whereas life is actually a bit more complex, whether in psychology or physiology. Difficult fractures or surgically-corrected bone deformities do not always grow back stronger. More often than not, they require metallic implants that can cause problems such as infection, irritation and discomfort. According to medical literature, a full 81 per cent of all orthopaedic surgeries that use a titanium-based implant require risky secondary surgery to remove the screw, plate or pin. The infection rate after secondary surgery is said to be as high as 20 per cent, with the repeat-fracture rate after removal sitting at 27 per cent. For polymerbased implants, foreign body reactions stand at 27.9 per cent of cases, while breakage during surgery is 11.6 per cent. Overall complications weigh in at a concerning 39 per cent.
FORTIFYING/HEALING BIOTECHNOLOGY
It’s clear that medical technology faces a serious problem – so much for Charles Blow’s comments, literally or metaphorically. This is where the global game-changing biotechnological solution by a multidiscipline-qualified German professor Utz Claassen, 56, comes to the fore – ironically and belatedly rendering Blow’s quote true.
After several decades of meticulous experimentation, research and development, Prof Claassen has come up with a bio-absorbable metal implant device made of bonefriendly magnesium. With inbuilt anti-infection properties, it is – quite remarkably, it must be said – absorbed into the bone, disappearing entirely. This provides support for the bone in the time it takes to heal, strengthens it, increases flexibility and promotesand accelerates healing. The thorny percentages cited earlier have, at a single stroke, been eliminated in
one of the most disruptive advances in medical technology in more than a century.
‘With other implants, the total complication risk is nearly 40 per cent.
Also, if you look at the literature on anaesthesia, the incidence rate of something undesirable happening while under is between 10 and 40 per cent, depending on the patient’s age,’ says Professor Claassen. ‘Even in advanced countries, the chances of irreversible damage with anaesthesia are about one in a hundred. My deep conviction is that any unnecessary surgery and anaesthesia that can be avoided, has to be – even more so in children. There is almost always traumatisation with surgery, so every single unnecessary surgery is at least gross negligence – one might even argue, a crime.’
MIMICKING THE HUMAN BONE
The biomechanical properties of the implant, trademarked as MAGNEZIX, are very similar to those of human bone. Since the holding company Syntellix AG was founded in 2008, there have been no implant-related complications recorded while using this compound. One top German orthopaedic surgeon reported doing 800 surgeries with a 100 per cent patient satisfaction rate.
Not only are MAGNEZIX implants proving clinically superior to other metals, but any screws inadvertently or unavoidably left protruding are no longer a problem – they will simply be absorbed. The metal compound also provides clean long-term MRI and CT scans, something the other metal implants cannot match.
Professor Claassen has so far registered 160 derivatives of the screw and at last count (late August 2019) had sold more than 46 000 units worldwide. His team received feedback on 1 088 of these devices, of which only 33 involved genuine clinically undesirable results. Of these 33, only four had to be reported to the health authorities. Further analysis and examination proved that not a single reported case could be attributed to the implant itself.
A former CEO of nuclear-, solar energyand other biotech companies, as well as a New York hedge fund, Professor Claassen holds degrees in economics, industrial design and business studies, and considers himself an avid and lifelong student. He’s studied brain interhemispheric relations, and neuropsychological development and economics. He also wrote a thesis on the connectivity between brain research and economics when he was only 22 years old. He is now an extremely busy man – in a recent interview with him during the 65th annual congress of the South African Orthopaedic Association, he explained that he’d spent nine of the previous 30 days on 13-hour flights between various European cities and Singapore, where his company is listed on the Singapore Exchange, trading in Asia.
SLEEPLESS IN SINGAPORE
Prof Claassen is indefatigable; a tireless worker. ‘I normally sleep about two to four hours a night. I don’t know the sensation of not being able to concentrate,’ he explains. ‘I believe the psychological desire for sleep is higher than the physiological desire. If I thought about jet lag, I would get tired. I’ve always had a surfeit of energy, learnt from my family upbringing and through self-discipline.’
His company has won nearly every technical innovation prize obtainable in Germany, which isn’t surprising given that it’s spent between half and 90 per cent of its budget on research and development. Of Germany’s 30 or more university hospitals, six are now routinely using the new products and another 28 are in negotiations to use them. He expects a
100 per cent figure within a few years.
‘We’re now working on products for neurosurgery, which is a very big market, aesthetics and dental surgery, plus the veterinary market,’ Prof Claassen adds, describing MAGNEZIX as especially useful in cranial-surgery closure and healing.
With its history of innovation and creativity, Prof Claassen sees South
Africa as the pioneering country on the African continent. Already, six major public academic hospitals here are using it, having been convinced of the economic and patient-load-reduction benefits. And patient-load reduction is something that’s of critical importance in our public-sector hospitals, particularly in the orthopaedicand trauma-surgeon fields.
‘What can be more profitable for the public sector than avoiding unnecessary surgeries?’ asks Prof Claassen. ‘It benefits the patient, doctor and the hospital. Facilities can then use their limited capacities for higher-value work than implant removals.’
Prof Claassen attributes his groundbreaking innovation to a straightforward personal philosophy: ‘Every problem is solvable, if you ask the right questions.’
Internationally renowned orthopaedic surgeon at Raffles Hospital in Singapore Professor Gowreeson Thevendran sums it up with a persuasive statement: ‘In the five years that I have worked with these implants, I have not seen any adverse effects in patients. They are as good as titanium, but have many advantages. I would call them the new gold standard in orthopaedic and trauma surgery.’