Most people know someone who has had a hip or a knee replaced. In fact, thanks to age, illness and injury, many of us can expect to have a joint replaced at some point in our lives.  

According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information (CIHI), in 2021-2022, 58,635 hip and 58,443 knee replacements were performed at a cost of almost $1.26 billion in Canada. CIHI also reports that the rate of additional surgeries to replace or fix hip and knee replacements, called revisions, sits at 7.6 percent, which only adds further cost and stress onto the healthcare system.  

Dr Yu Zou, Assistant Professor & Dean's Spark Professor at the University of Toronto and a 2023 recipient of the Acceleration Consortium’s (AC) Accelerate Moonshot Grant, believes that better materials can help bring down the revision rate and improve surgery outcomes. The Accelerate Moonshot Grants support high-risk, high-reward projects with an emphasis on an interdisciplinary approach that brings together a diverse group of scientists.  

“Since the first joint replacement surgery was done in the 1960s, we have not made many advancements in the materials we use,” said Dr Zou. “Additionally, the materials we have now are not always the right fit for every patient. The work we’re doing funded by the Acceleration Consortium’s grant will hopefully change that so we can make a real difference in the lives of people suffering from osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis and other conditions that cause joint damage.”

Dr Zou’s team includes Ibrahim Ogunsanya, Assistant Professor in the Department of Civil and Mineral Engineering; Xinyu Liu, Professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering; and Adele Changoor, Assistant Professor in Medicine and Pathobiology in the Faculty of Medicine, as well as a few additional collaborators at U of T . Together, they will build up a self-driving lab (SDL) to rapidly test combinations of elements to find just the right ones to make novel materials,  such as new high-entropy alloys, which Dr Zou is an expert in, to enable better outcomes for joint-replacement surgery the first time.

“Creating new materials is a lot like cooking,” said Dr Zou. “You can add this much pepper, that much salt, but if you change the quantities even just a little, you get a completely different result. When you think about all the different elements out there and all the different ways you can mix them together, it is easy to come to millions of different alloy combinations. It would take decades to make them all without AI and SDLs, much less test them to discover if they would make good joint replacements. That’s what is so exciting about this work. SDLs are going to find the right recipe faster and cheaper.”

As an experienced scientist, Dr Zou took on this project because he wanted to take on a challenge that would have immediate and meaningful real-world applications and measurable results.  

“The number of hip and knee replacement surgeries are only going to rise as our population ages,” said Dr Zou. “It is in everyone’s best interests to make the process better and especially, get the percentage of revision surgeries down. The hospital stay after a revision surgery is more than twice as long, and, since the patient is usually older, recovery time is longer. That’s why I wanted to do this project. By creating new materials, we are hoping to be able to customize solutions that consider things like gender and level of activity for people to get better outcomes the first time and reduce the revision rate. Once discovered, these materials will have a real and meaningful effect in the lives of millions of people.”

Zou estimates his project will see preliminary results within the next 3-5 years.  

“When you’re talking about the human body, there are many necessary hoops to jump through before a technology is approved,” said Dr Zou. “But I am excited to get this work started and discover these new materials.”

The 2024 Accelerate Moonshot Grant applications will open in the spring of 2024.