The Honourable Bob Carr shares his amazing success story as a spinal implant recipient.
Former Premier of New South Wales The Honourable Bob Carr with UTS Graduates Chloe Amaro and Jess Wind.
‘I found myself on the floor. My back was in pain’. The Honourable Bob Carr, former Premier of New South Wales and Adjunct Professor at UTS, had fainted getting out of bed. It was a week from Easter Saturday, 2022.
A CT scan revealed a serious burst fracture to his spine. His vertebra was shattered, and he feared a life of limited mobility and never walking without pain again.
Almost five years earlier, Chloe Amaro and Jess Wind were beginning their studies at UTS. Although they were in different undergraduate courses, Chloe earning a Bachelor of Biomedical Engineering and Jess a Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering, they both also earned a combined Bachelor of Creative Intelligence and Innovation. BCII is a unique degree established at UTS, which focuses on cross-discipline collaboration to achieve high-level solutions rooted in creative thinking and conceptualizing.
The results of Bob Carr’s CT scan demanded immediate action, and he opted for a bold treatment — a replacement of the L2 vertebra with a revolutionary 3D printed implant. This was cutting-edge technology, and the doctor who successfully performed this operation was Sydney neurosurgeon Dr. Ralph Mobbs, who would also be Bob’s surgeon.
The implant to be inserted into Professor Carr’s body would be computer designed and 3D printed in titanium, with the implant endplate contact surface matching the exact surface topology of the vertebra in his spine, and the company that would be manufacturing this implant was 3DMorphic.
After graduation from UTS Chloe gained a position at 3DMorphic, a Sydney MedTech company that designs and manufactures patient specific spinal implants. Jess joined the company two months later and once again, Chloe and Jess were engineering project teammates.
Chloe’s clinical and regulatory expertise and Jess’s specialisation in production manufacturing and supply chain meshed perfectly together into 3DMorphic’s quality assurance team, building the quality management system based on ISO standards.
Chloe and Jess found that at 3DMorphic they put into action the collaboration and project skills they honed at UTS. They vet production processes through teamwork, specialist review, and engaging the stakeholders. ‘At 3DMorphic, for the production process of the surgical implants’, Jess explained, ‘we design and manufacture in house, in Sydney’. This complete top to bottom production capability of 3DMorphic proved vital in creating a spinal implant for Bob Carr in the 48 hours after his CT scan results, a world first for an emergency trauma spinal implant. With bone fragments compressing his spinal canal, the timing was critical.
The surgery, ‘went for the better part of nine hours,’ Professor Carr recalled, and then ‘they told me that it worked — such wonderful news to get’!
After Professor Carr made the details of his surgery publicly known, he also had the opportunity to visit 3DMorphic, where his titanium spinal implant was designed and crafted, and where he met Chloe Amaro and Jess Wind. 3DMorphic have been creating surgical implants for patients from all segments of the community and — because of strict adherence to patient confidentially — they rarely even know the identity of the patients that they are creating implants for.
When Professor Carr met Chloe and Jess at the 3DMorphic office, ‘I was astonished to realise they were out of UTS with this exotic sounding [BCII] degree and they were working for an Australian company that's pioneering this treatment, making such a difference... it was such a special experience talking to the people who worked for 48 hours to make the device that now sits between my L1 and my L3’.
The team at 3DMorphic equally enjoyed the opportunity to meet a patient who benefited from one of their surgical implants. Chloe explained, ‘That all this hard work — and the effort that goes into all this research and design behind it — is really making people's lives better, is fantastic to see. And we see that with so many of our devices. It's really rewarding’.
‘I love that you can get to a solution.’ Jess added, about the applied science and engineering work they do, ‘It's great to use research to inform that... but I also think that it's great to be able to interact with someone, see how they benefit from something that you actually can physically create for them... That's what we do at 3DMorphic’.
Chloe and Jess are just as enthusiastic about the potential of the work 3DMorphic beyond spinal implants. Chloe expounded, ‘in the future, I can see that this can definitely be applied to other parts of the body... anywhere that you need sort of custom devices to fit to the patient’. She continued, ‘This is where technology — not only for spine surgery, but for other sorts of surgeries — is going in the future. It's going to be personalised because of the ability and the knowledge that the world is now gaining in making these sorts of devices specific for patients.’
‘I owe so much to these people’, Professor Carr said with noticeable emotion in his voice. ‘For me... it’s been an adventure. I've been in the depths of despair, fearing the loss of my treasured mobility. And then we’re looking at solution... and here I come across two graduates who have planted themselves in this adventurous enterprise, and as it happens, I’m carrying in my vertebrae — the evidence of how it works’.