Antibacterial coating developer Orthobond reports first human case

An image showing the Onkos Surgical ELEOS Limb Salvage System.

The Onkos Surgical ELEOS Limb Salvage System uses NanoCept antibacterial technology. [Image courtesy of Onkos Surgical]

Orthobond says a medical device treated with its Ostaguard antibacterial coating technology has been surgically implanted in a human patient for the first time.

The technology won its first FDA de novo approvals in April 2024 for SeaSpine Mariner pedicle screws and implants developed and manufactured by Onkos Surgical, which reported the first successful surgeries last week.

“We are immensely proud to have reached this remarkable milestone in such a short timeframe,” Orthobond CEO David Nichols said in a news release. “We have established 10 partnerships across diverse applications in several medical fields, including orthopedics, plastic surgery reconstruction, ophthalmology, ENT, and dental, demonstrating industry interest in a novel antibacterial technology to address significant clinical issues. Our team’s relentless dedication and hard work have been instrumental in achieving this success, and we look forward to leveraging our development and commercialization capabilities with our partners.”

Onkos Surgical has branded Orthobond’s antibacterial coating technology as NanoCept. The company used NanoCept on its ELEOS Limb Salvage System, a modular total joint system for bone loss patients.

“The successful completion of these initial surgeries is a key achievement and significant milestone in our strategy to deploy the NanoCept Technology across our portfolio,” Onkos CEO and co-founder Patrick Treacy said in his own company’s news release. “We believe NanoCept is a platform technology that will substantially extend our reach and capability in broad orthopaedic markets, and we are actively working to expand regulatory clearances beyond ELEOS to include implants used in orthopaedic reconstruction due to tumor, trauma and other orthopaedic revision procedures.”

Onkos Surgical Chief Medical Officer Dr. Steven Gitelis — the director of musculoskeletal oncology at Rush University Medical Center — said the technology “has the potential to create a paradigm shift in implant selection and is a valuable tool surgeons will now have that may help address an unsolved clinical problem.”

“Limb salvage and revision procedures are challenging, and the rate of complication is much higher than most index orthopaedic procedures,” he said in the Onkos release. “The risk of implant infection is on my mind every time I take a patient to the operating room, and this is especially true for patients with bone cancer, as they are more susceptible. The NanoCept Technology represents a significant advancement in the preventative measures my colleagues and I use to mitigate the potentially devastating complications related to intraoperative bacterial contamination of implants.”

Onkos said when it won FDA de novo approval that the technology had not been shown in human clinical trials to prevent or reduce infection rates, but that test results showed up to a 99.999% kill rate in standardized in-vitro testing of bacteria commonly found in the operating room environment.