Nano Nexus 2007 Team Profiles: Florida International University

Pictured l-r: Faculty Advisor Arvind Agarwal, Karym Urdaneta, ORNL Director Jeff Wadsworth, Nano Nexus Managing Director Joy Fisher, Tapas Laha, Jorge Tercero.

Team: Bioceramic Coating
Team Members: Tapas Laha, Jorge Tercero, Karym Urdaneta
School: Florida International University
Faculty Advisor: Arvind Agarwal
Product or Service: A high-strength bioceramic coating for bone replacement substances for orthopedic applications, such as those used for hip and knee replacements.

Presently, metallic implants are coated with hydroxyapatite (HAP) due to its bioactivity and biocompatibility, although its brittle nature and poor strength under load bearing conditions limit the life span of implants. The Bioceramic Coating team has improved the HAP coating by strengthening it with carbon nanotube (CNT). CNTs are nanoparticles that are 100 times stronger than steel and only one-sixth as dense. The underlying technology of the team’s product is based on the successful synthesis of HAP-CNT nanocomposite coating by plasma spray technique.

Plasma spray has been used for several years for HAP coatings. Dispersion of CNT in nanocomposites for a large scale application is a technological challenge, but the Bioceramic Coating team is the first to prove that CNTs can be successfully dispersed in a large-scale matrix by plasma spraying, which is relatively economic sue to its ease of scale up in production.

In the United States alone, an average of 300,000 hip and knee replacements surgeries are performed each year. That trend is expected in increase to about 500,000 by the year 2040 due to the aging population. The world market in orthopedic implants is a $4.3 billion industry.

The Bioceramic Coating team recently participated in the Nano I2P® Competition at Nano Nexus 2007, a nanotechnology conference hosted by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, on April 3, 2007. The conference brought together universities, entrepreneurs, and leaders of the nanotechnology industry in an effort to move nanotechnology out of research organizations and into the marketplace.

”This type of forum really encourages students and helps us think outside of the box,” said Karym Urdaneta, an M.B.A. candidate at Florida International. “There’s validation in being able to share our research with people from the industry alongside some of the larger schools that are here.”