Question: how exactly do you try to understand more about diseases? do you sometimes talk to people with these illnesses or are there scientific experiments you can do in the lab?

Sophie Cox answered on 7 Mar 2017:

Hi Nemofish,

That’s a really great questions!

We actually do both. Talking to patients is a great opportunity for us to figure out what the current problems are that need solving. We also try to speak with surgeons / doctors who actually perform the operations to put in implants. It is really important that the devices we make can be easily used by the surgeon and also have benefits to the patient.

We also use a number of techniques in the lab to try and understand more about the affects that diseases have on our body. I guess the aim of this is firstly to see if there are new ways of stopping diseases from progressing and we can only do that if we firstly understand what is happening. Secondly, patients with diseases, let’s take a disease called osteoporosis for example (that’s when bones become more porous and less strong with age), when designing an implant for patients with osteoporosis we have to consider how the patient’s bones will interact and support the implant we put in. As a simple example think about if you hammered a nail into a strong piece of wood and hammering the nail into a soft material like jelly. It’s going to be way easier to pull the nail out of the jelly than the wood right? Well it’s kind of the same principle with implants we have to understand the properties of the tissue (which is often diseased and therefore different to health people’s bone) that will surround the implant.

Does that make sense?

Thanks for your questions, I enjoyed answering it 🙂