An implant is usually designed to replace what the body has lost. But what if it could do something more? For the team behind VETREGEN, one question is driving an ambitious experiment in regenerative medicine: can we build an implant that supports the body today – while helping it rebuild itself for tomorrow?
The human body is constantly rebuilding itself. Bone may appear solid and permanent, but it is living tissue, continuously adapting, repairing and remodelling. For the researcher behind VETREGEN, Evren Coskun Becit, that biological reality raised a deceptively simple question.
If bone is dynamic, why should an implant be passive? His career had taken him from life sciences into additive manufacturing and eventually 3D printing for healthcare. As manufacturing technologies made increasingly complex geometries possible, he began wondering whether implants themselves could be reconsidered. Not simply as structures that replace damaged bone. But as structures designed to work with it. VETREGEN is an attempt to find out.
Building for today and tomorrow
Orthopaedic implants perform an essential mechanical task: stabilising damaged bone so it can withstand the forces placed upon it. But complex bone defects can demand more than mechanical stability.
VETREGEN’s concept combines a patient-specific PEKK scaffold with a biodegradable and bioactive phase made from PCL and bioactive glass. A biomimetic gyroid architecture is intended to provide a structure in which mechanical and biological functions can be engineered together.
The idea is to provide the support required immediately after surgery while creating conditions that could encourage the patient’s own bone to grow into the implant. Part of the structure is designed to remain. Another is intended to degrade over time. The ambition is therefore not simply to replace what is missing, but to create an implant that changes as healing progresses.
“For me, VETREGEN is ultimately about one idea,” Evren Coskun Becit explains, “using technology not just to replace part of the body, but to help the body rebuild itself.” It is a compelling proposition. It is also, at this stage, still a proposition.
Starting with animals
VETREGEN is initially focusing on veterinary orthopaedics. For the team, this is not simply a stepping stone towards human healthcare. Complex bone reconstruction represents a genuine clinical challenge in animals, where standard implant geometries may not always accommodate individual anatomy.
A personalised approach could potentially offer another option. The team believes veterinary medicine provides an opportunity to investigate whether its combination of patient-specific design, mechanical support and regenerative principles can translate into meaningful clinical benefits.
But the concept still needs evidence. VETREGEN has not yet demonstrated that the complete system works as intended. Its founder is unusually candid about that. “We have not proved the whole concept yet – that is exactly the journey ahead.” What the team has achieved is something earlier, but essential: transforming a broad idea into a technically coherent concept, bringing together materials, architecture and manufacturing into something they can define, build and ultimately test.
Sometimes innovation begins not with proving that you are right, but with reaching the point where you can properly test whether you are.
“What if it works?”
The journey to that point has not been easy. Ask VETREGEN’s founder whether there have been moments when he questioned continuing and the answer is striking: “Almost every single day.” Access to specialised materials and machinery is limited. Funding remains difficult. And developing a technology at the intersection of advanced manufacturing, materials science and regenerative medicine requires repeated experimentation.
Yet one thought keeps returning. “What if it works?” For him, that possibility is enough to continue. It also reveals something about the kind of optimism behind early-stage innovation. There is no guarantee that an idea will succeed simply because its creators believe in it. Experiments may fail. Assumptions may prove wrong. The technology may have to change. But before evidence exists, someone has to believe the question is worth investigating.
The machine standing between an idea and an experiment
Right now, one of VETREGEN’s biggest obstacles is remarkably tangible. A machine. The team needs access to a high-temperature, open-material additive manufacturing platform capable of processing high-performance thermoplastics such as PEKK. Without that capability in-house, experimentation depends on external equipment and availability.
With it, the team could iterate continuously – adjusting materials, architecture and manufacturing parameters, testing what happens, learning and trying again. For an early-stage technology, that speed matters.
Evren Coskun Becit describes the difference simply: having the right equipment could help turn VETREGEN “from an idea we can only discuss into a technology we can systematically develop”. Behind the sophistication of regenerative medicine lies one of innovation’s most practical realities: sometimes progress depends on having the tools required to try.
Curiosity as a strategy
VETREGEN brings together a multidisciplinary team at CIM UPC spanning mechanical engineering, materials science, industrial design, biology, advanced manufacturing and project development.
Its founder himself sits between disciplines, combining a background in molecular biology and genetics with extensive experience in additive manufacturing and healthcare applications, including previous work at HP. That combination matters because VETREGEN cannot be solved from a single perspective.
An implant may need to satisfy biology and mechanics simultaneously. It needs to be manufacturable. Its architecture needs to be designed. Its materials need to behave predictably. Eventually, its clinical value needs to be demonstrated.
The team describes itself as persistent, diligent and patient. Yet another characteristic emerges repeatedly from the founder’s answers: curiosity. His advice to other innovators is to keep their thinking as curious as that of a four-year-old child. Keep asking: Why? Why not? What if? “Keep it simple and focus on the root of the problem,” he says, rather than making the solution unnecessarily complicated.
For a project built around questioning what an implant should actually do, it seems fitting advice.
Finding the people who challenge the idea
That same willingness to question assumptions influenced the team’s decision to join BRIDGE. VETREGEN has reached a stage where its creators no longer want to develop the idea in isolation. They are looking for veterinary, biomaterials and industrial expertise, potential investors and strategic partners who can help them assess the technology from clinical and commercial perspectives. But they are also looking for something potentially less comfortable: people prepared to challenge them.
“We want to find out whether others see the same potential in the idea that we do,” Evren Coskun Becit explains, “and, if they do, what it would take to make it happen.” Through BRIDGE, the team hopes to strengthen its investor readiness, build strategic partnerships and develop a clearer commercialisation strategy.
From concept to evidence
One year from now, VETREGEN’s founder hopes the conversation will have changed. Not from idea to success. From concept to evidence. The team hopes to have generated its first promising in-vitro results and progressed towards in-vivo veterinary studies, gradually building the evidence needed to understand whether the concept can move towards clinical application.
There is a long journey between those experiments and an implant routinely used in veterinary practice. The team knows that. Perhaps that is why its story is not really about certainty. It is about curiosity strong enough to survive uncertainty.
VETREGEN began with a scientist looking at an implant and asking why it should simply sit inside the body when biology itself is constantly changing around it. The answer is still unknown. But for now, another question is enough to keep the team moving: What if it works?