More than 170 million metal screws are used in surgeries worldwide every year. Most of these foreign bodies have to be removed in a complex, second operation. This can lead to additional complications and pain for patients.
With an innovation from Upper Austria, which is already being used with great success in orthopedic interventions, these problems can be demonstrably avoided.
After decades of research, the Linz orthopaedist Klaus Pastl invented “bone screws”, which are now being mass-produced by the company “Surgebright”.
Klaus Pastl runs the multiple award-winning company together with his sons Thomas and Lukas. “Surgebright” obtains the raw material for the innovative screws, i.e. the human bones, from tissue banks, as managing director Thomas Pastl explains.
Innovation from Lichtenberg
The screws are then manufactured by hand at the company site in Lichtenberg, and in Austria alone they are used in 95 hospitals. More than 4000 of these products, which call themselves “Shark Screw”, have been used in this country. At a symposium in Linz yesterday, doctors from all over Austria reported on their experiences.
“Our special teams at the Vienna University Hospital treat, among other things, hallux valgus, pseudoarthrosis and other hand and foot malpositions very successfully with these bone screws. This method also has great potential in pediatric orthopaedics,” said Catharina Chiari, President of the Austrian Society for Orthopedics and Orthopedic Surgery .
Screws transform themselves
The district hospital (BKH) Schwaz in Tyrol has treated around 400 patients with “Shark Screw” within six years. “It has been shown that the bone screws can help many patients not only in orthopedics but also in trauma surgery. In most cases, the screws have completely converted into their own bones after just one year and are almost no longer visible on X-rays,” said Markus Reichkendler, head of trauma surgery and orthopedics in the BKH Schwaz.
An interdisciplinary research group from Graz, Vienna, Berlin and Linz recently demonstrated that the healing process is faster and more efficient as a result.
“We have set ourselves the goal of saving 500,000 patients worldwide the risk of a second operation over the next few years and of training 5,000 surgeons to use our bone screws,” says Klaus Pastl. (bar)
Source: Nachrichten
