The switch to personalized medicine is already slowly taking place due to changing trends in healthcare itself and in healthcare compensation systems – the payments from ‘per no. of treatments’ progressively moving to ‘outcomes of treatment’. Personalised medicine not only improves quality of life, but also contributes to more sustainable healthcare in EU countries. It drives new and faster development processes and products, providing European life sciences industries with a competitive edge that can secure growth and jobs. And patient-specific implants are pioneering in this transformation.

To support development of mass-customization technology platform that significantly changes the way surgical practice and entire implant industry operates the European Commission via Horizon 2020 SME Instrument funding Program have granted Lithuanian company Ortho Baltic over 1,5 million Euro to develop technological solutions that ensure Ortho Baltic effective management of patient-specific implants design, manufacturing and validation processes to ensure their competitiveness in respect to off shelf standard implants. The company’s overall objective of INOVER 21 project is to solve two societal challenges.

First, the project aims to incentivize surgeons to apply personalized surgical solutions more widely. This relates to the change of a current surgical thought paradigm. Instead of letting surgeons continue to twist and turn trying to solve the problem of “how to make do with what we have” the company ask them to describe the individual constructional and functional solutions to be implemented in an implant that is going to be used in treatment of a specific patient, in a specific clinical case. Ortho Baltic project will further accelerate this by developing 3D pre-surgery planning web platform, providing tools for surgeons training to apply patient-specific implants in surgery treatment and for communication with implant manufacturers in product design and validation processes, but not limited to this.

Second, and most importantly, the company is positioned to make a premium-quality medical product (patient-specific implants and surgical guides) more available and affordable to general public in price and supply terms. From one side this will be caused by growing demand for patient-specific medical devices which lead to economies of scale. From other side, Ortho Baltic will use factory floor processes management and optimization platform to make the transition from unitary to mass production more efficient than their competitors, who will then be forced to adapt and drop their currently-inflated prices to remain competitive.