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Medical Device Developments Vol. 2 2024


Editorial Editor Andrea Valentino


Sub-editors Tal Abdulrazaq, Pete Barden, Tony Rock Production manager Dave Stanford Group art director Henrik Williams Designer Martin Faulkner


Commercial Client services executive Derek Deschamps


Division sales manager Martin John martin.john@businesstrademediainternational.com


Publication manager Danielle Driver danielle.driver@businesstrademediainternational.com


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t’s tempting to imagine that medical developments are pushed along by basic clinical need – that scientists see a problem, they go off to their labs, and design a device to solve it. Certainly, emergencies like the pandemic suggest that this model can and does work. That’s clear enough when it comes to something like masks, with technicians crafting a plethora of strong, sustainable examples. Yet if the world’s manufacturing titans prompted a 30-fold rise in mask output from 2019-20, this edition of Medical Device Developments equally suggests that the line between need and result isn’t quite so straightforward. Consider, for instance, an area like surgery. We already know that remote operations are a boon across healthcare – and we also know that faster internet connections can offer almost instantaneous feedback, even to surgeons thousands of miles away. Yet until recently anyway, we hadn’t combined this obvious demand and clear supply into something useful. What in practice needed to happen, rather, was for a doctor to add two and two together. In the event, that only occurred when Vipul Patel, a US-based doctor, used the immense power of 5G to conduct telesurgery across the planet in China. And if Lauren Hurrell takes up that story in our pages, it’s far from the only area where medical advancements are pushed on more by human ingenuity than simple necessity. We’ve long known, after all, that machine learning is a great way to parse vast amounts of data. But until a team at Google DeepMind came along and deployed a vigorous new model, we’d in reality struggled to use the technology to develop useful new materials.


Nature can nurture I


Dan Cave, for his part, tells a similar tale about so-called biomimetic design. As far back as Leonardo da Vinci, humans have been conscious that the natural world can theoretically inspire even the most complex of technologies. But until researchers in England and Spain actually took these principles and applied them – notably for their antimicrobial properties – the path from theory to practice had rarely been trod. In a medical landscape of abstract forces and broad technological improvement, the fact that ambitious individuals can still make a difference is surely something to cheer – especially when, from implantables to vector beams, there’s clearly much work to be done.


Andrea Valentino, editor


Medical Device Developments / www.nsmedicaldevices.com


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