Tag: Paul Ducheyne

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Paul Ducheyne Honored with 2023 ISCM Hironobu Oonishi Memorial Award

Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D.

Paul Ducheyne, Professor Emeritus in Bioengineering and Orthopaedic Surgery Research, has won the 2023 Hironobu Oonishi Memorial Award from the International Society for Ceramics in Medicine (ISCM). This award, the ISCM’s top honor, will only be awarded ten times in total, with previous honorees hailing from Japan and France and focusing on clinical research and life sciences. As the fifth honoree, Ducheyne is the first biomaterials researcher and engineer to win this distinguished prize.

Dr. Hironobu Oonishi was one of the founders of the International Society for Ceramics in Medicine and a leading hip surgeon. He was known for his discovery that irradiated polyethylene displayed greatly improved wear resistance in total joint replacements. In his memory, the ISCM and Kyocera created the Hironobu Oohnishi Memorial Award, with the goal to honor scientists who contributed to ISCM and greatly advanced the clinical use of bioceramics. Each year, the awardee is selected by a committee chaired by Dr. Hiroshi Oonishi, Dr. Hironobu Oonishi’s son. Once ten awardees have been selected, the award granting process will be closed.

Dr. Ducheyne accepted his award at the ISCM annual meeting in Solothurn, Switzerland in October 2023, where he delivered the Opening Ceremony lecture entitled “Bioceramics and Clinical Use – the struggle of memory against forgetting.”

Dr. Ducheyne has been a leading scientist in the field of biomaterial research for decades, with seminal contributions to biomaterials research, especially as it relates to orthopaedics. In bioceramics research, he clearly delineated the unusual properties of engineered bioactive ceramics. Not only was he at the vanguard of the development of these materials, he also generated a fundamental understanding of how these materials exhibit bone bioactive properties and promote skeletal healing. His group has also studied inorganic controlled release materials and has demonstrated the utility of sol-gel synthesized silica-based nanoporous materials for therapeutic use. These materials may well represent a next generation of agents for delivery of drugs, including antibiotics, analgesics, and osteogenic and anti-inflammatory molecules.

During his tenure at Penn, he directed the Center for Bioactive Materials and Tissue Engineering. He was also a Special Guest Professor at the KU Leuven, Belgium. He has founded several successful companies: XeroThera, a spin-out from Penn, that is developing advanced controlled delivery concepts for prophylaxis and treatment of surgical infections; Orthovita, a leading, independent biomaterials company in the world with more than 250 employees at the time of its acquisition by Stryker in June 2011; and Gentis, Inc., which focuses on breakthrough concepts for spinal disorders.

Congratulations to Dr. Ducheyne from everyone at Penn Bioengineering.

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Penn Bioengineering Faculty Member Paul Ducheyne Receives the European Society for Biomaterials’ International Award

Ducheyne
Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D.

by Sophie Burkholder

We would like to congratulate Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D., a Professor in the Bioengineering Department and a Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery Research at Penn, on being selected for the International Award by the European Society for Biomaterials (ESB). The International Award is one of the ESB’s highest honors, recognizing scientists who have spent the majority of their careers outside of Europe. They are internationally recognized, have a high scientific profile, and have made  major contributions to the field of biomaterials. Those nominated for the award typically also have had strong collaborations with the scientific community in Europe throughout their careers.

Beyond being a professor at Penn, Ducheyne is also the founder of XeroThera, a spin-out from Penn that develops novel concepts for tissue engineering and drug delivery based on his group’s twenty years of fundamental studies of sol gel-processed, nanoporous, oxide-based materials. XeroThera’s first product formulations focus on prophylaxis and treatment of surgical infections. A pipeline is being developed building from his group’s breakthrough data   that demonstrate the utility of sol-gel synthesized silica-based nanoporous materials for therapeutic use. These materials may well represent a next generation of agents for delivery of drugs, including antibiotics, analgesics, and osteogenic and anti-inflammatory molecules.

In being selected for the International Award, Ducheyne joins only five previous recipients of it so far, a group of scientists that represents those at the top of the field in biomaterials worldwide. Ducheyne will give a presentation and award lecture for the ESB at its next annual meeting this September in Dresden, Germany. Read more about the ESB’s awards here and see the full list of 2019 awardees here.

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Ducheyne Edits New Biomaterials Text

Ducheyne
Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D.

A Penn Bioengineering professor, Paul Ducheyne, Ph.D., is the editor-in-chief of the new second edition of Comprehensive Biomaterials II, released by Elsevier on June 1. The seven-volume collection, which Dr. Ducheyne edited along with faculty members from the University of California, Berkeley, Queensland University of Technology (Australia), University of Utah, and Johannes Gutenberg University Medical Center (Germany), collects articles written by experts in the field of biomaterials.

According to Elsevier, the articles “address the current status of nearly all biomaterials in the field, their strengths and weaknesses, their future prospects, appropriate analytical methods and testing, device applications and performance, emerging candidate materials as competitors and disruptive technologies, research and development, regulatory management, commercial aspects, and applications, including medical applications.”

In the preface to the collection, Dr. Ducheyne details how his team and Elsevier worked together to assure the continued high impact of the text by issuing it in both a print version and online via Elsevier’s Science Direct platform. He writes further, “It was the objective of the editorial team to compose the publication with chapters that would provide strategic insights for those working in diverse biomaterials applications, research and development, regulatory management, and industry.”