The Horizon Europe BIOMET4D project has marked the halfway point in its mission to develop the next generation of shape-shifting implants with its second consortium meeting in Dublin, Ireland.

Aside from representing the significant milestone of the project’s second anniversary, the meeting also featured the first in-person meeting of BIOMET4D’s Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB), with board members Xabier Álvarez, Frank Reinauer and Dr. Dylan Murray on hand to lend their expertise to proceedings.

The consortium meeting kicked off on June 26, with an opening meeting in which project partners had the opportunity to hear from Mr. Álvarez, representative of the National Association for Apert Syndrome and Other Syndromic Craniosynostosis (APERTCRAS, Spain), and Mr. Frank Reinauer, head of production and innovations for biomaterials at KLS Martin (Germany).

“I think this year’s meeting was especially exciting,” said Project Coordinator, Dr. Jennifer Patterson from IMDEA Materials Institute. “Firstly, because of its significance in marking the halfway point of the project, and secondly, to be able to hear from our SAB members in person”.

“Mr. Álvarez from APERTCRAS provided a compelling perspective of the family members of children suffering from these diseases, while it was equally interesting to hear from an industry perspective on the project from Mr. Reinauer,” she added.

The meeting continued on Thursday with several technical sessions related to the engineering side of the project, focusing on advances in the project’s first four work packages (WPs), presented by WP leaders, Prof. Ándres Díaz Lantada (UPM), Mr. Simon Pöstges (Meotec), Prof. Jon Molina (IMDEA), and Prof. Ted Vaughan (University of Galway). 

PhD student and project researcher, William Solórzano Requejo, also brought some prototypes of actuator designs to facilitate discussion with the other project partners as well as with the SAB members. 

A formal meeting of the BIOMET4D SAB, meanwhile was held on Thursday morning, where the SAB members were updated about the technical progress of the project and were able to provide their feedback.  In this session, Mr. Álvarez, Mr. Reinauer, and Dr. Murray were joined by SAB member Dr. Ralf Smeets, who participated online.

On Friday, the focus of the meeting shifted to the clinical applications of the research project, with main technical discussions focused on WPs 5 and 6, which are led by Dr. Nadja Kröger (UKA) and Prof. Manuel Desco (FIBHGM), as well as other aspects of the project, such as communication, dissemination, and exploitation activities.

“When you are involved in international projects like BIOMET4D, with partners from multiple countries, it is rare that we have the opportunity to sit down and meet face-to-face,” said Dr. Patterson. ¨For that reason, these meetings are so important, and it was great that we were able to take advantage of it to both review the project’s progress to this point, and to plan our next steps”. 

You can see photos from the BIOMET4D project on Flickr, here.