How do you learn to operate on tissue that doesn’t exist yet, the tissue of a patient arriving next week? One answer, on Gran Canaria, comes from a small company born in a university lab. Gradual Research S.L. comes out of the Integrated and Advanced Manufacturing research group at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (ULPGC) and works in advanced digital manufacturing.
Red CIDE, the Canary network of business innovation and development centres, highlighted it as a success story on 20 October. The account is the one published by ULPGC’s Canary Science and Technology Park Foundation (FCPCT-ULPGC) and picked up by La Voz Canaria. We couldn’t open the foundation’s page directly, so we rely on La Voz Canaria’s version, which names no founders, no clients or company figures, and carries no statements from the company.
The company works on two fronts. DiMeFa3D focuses on healthcare applications, while Bosquejo 3Dstudio handles multidisciplinary technology projects. The most striking product is a set of materials that mimic the tactile feel of human and animal tissue, used to build synthetic anatomical models for medical training and surgical planning. Then come customised orthoses and prostheses, made with 3D scanning and printing.
There is also a ULPGC patent on a process that combines different materials in a single print. Among its possible uses, the source says, is tissue regeneration. That is a possibility, not an application already in clinical use, and the difference matters.
The next step, for now, is administrative: the company is exploring recognition as a university spin-off. It sounds minor, but in Spain that status ties a company to the university that produced the research and eases its relationship with the intellectual property.
Red CIDE has acted as a bridge. Through FCPCT-ULPGC, Gradual Research received advice on tools and funding and was put in touch with potential partners. One of the projects is SYNERGIA ULPGC, which links it with organisations that could host Biomedical Engineering students. Red CIDE is run by the Canary Government’s Ministry of Universities, Science, Innovation and Culture, promoted by ACIISI and co-financed by the ERDF.
What does it change for people living here? Whether the anatomical models will reach the islands’ hospitals only time will tell: the source doesn’t say who the company works with on the health side. For now it is a useful story about how the Canary pipeline from university to business works, with all its intermediate steps.
