Get in touchProjects — Medical
A fibre the body accepts — then rebuilds around
One flagship programme applies natural spider silk where today's materials fall short: anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction — told with the depth a serious, well-evidenced research effort deserves.
The Flagship Programme
The ACL scaffold
The clinical problem. Anterior cruciate ligament injuries affect millions of people every year. Current reconstruction relies on autografts — harvesting the patient's own tendon — or synthetic materials, each with real limitations in donor-site morbidity, integration, and long-term durability.
The candidate material. Spider silk's tensile strength exceeds most synthetics, it is biocompatible, and it degrades predictably as the body builds new tissue around it. Critically, it can be fabricated into scaffold geometries that mimic the fibre architecture of a native ligament.
Where the research stands
The programme is in the feasibility-study phase with the research team, establishing scaffold fabrication and mechanical characterisation against native-ligament benchmarks. Key milestones to date include material selection and braiding geometry; the next steps move toward in vivo testing.
Research Collaboration
The people and institutions involved
Dr. Nupur Kohli
Biomaterials & Tissue Engineering
Research collaboration on the biocompatibility and tissue-integration behaviour of silk-based scaffolds.
Dr. Gundula Schulze-Tanzil
Orthopaedic Research
Research collaboration on the ACL programme, with affiliations spanning the Charité and the OARSI orthopaedic-research community.
Institutional affiliations
Academic & Clinical
Charité — Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Paracelsus Medical University, and the OARSI research network, engaged at the research-collaboration level.
All institutional relationships are described as research collaborations at their current early stage, and should not be read as endorsement or commercial partnership.
Development Pipeline
Where the programme sits
Feasibility
Material & geometry validation
Pre-clinical
In vivo testing & safety
Regulatory
Submission & review
Clinical trial
First-in-human study
A focused pipeline by design. The page is built so a second medical programme can join as a sibling section — same template, same tracker — when it reaches feasibility.
Methodology
We are committed to transparent, peer-reviewed science — rigorous data integrity, honest reporting of stage and limitation, and publication of results as the programmes mature.
Research Collaboration
Interested in collaborating on our research?
For academic and clinical partners exploring the programme.