The Knowledge Transfer Office (KTO) is pleased to announce that it has closed a deal on behalf of the University of Malta (UM) with Netherland-based NLC - The European Healthtech Venture Builder. This deal resulted in the creation of a new venture, Garland Surgical Ltd, and a seed investment of €100,000 by NLC with the aim of advancing the MaltaHip, invented by Prof. Pierre Schembri Wismayer, Prof. Ing. Joseph Buhagiar, Prof. Ing. Pierluigi Mollicone and Dr Ing. Donald Dalli. A licence agreement to the intellectual property of MaltaHip has also been signed between the University and Garland Surgical Ltd.
NLC was founded in 2015, and its mission is to build ventures and advance health. They select the most promising inventions and build them into viable healthtech ventures. Since 2015, NLC has evaluated thousands of inventions and built over 80 ventures. Newly-formed Garland Surgical is registered in the UK and recently appointed Chief Executive Officer Simon Mifsud to oversee its operations. Mifsud is an entrepreneurial general manager and brings with him more than 30 years of experience, specialising in the medical devices industry.
Knowledge and technology transfer are important and challenging activities that need to be undertaken within universities and research institutions in order to drive innovation and translate inventions into useful products and services for society. Concrete results are not easy to achieve because the complexity of the commercialisation process for innovative technologies, so successes such as this are very important, especially to encourage other researchers already engaged in the innovation process. The University of Malta’s KTO will continue working towards transforming the excellent research that the university develops in order to ensure
societal and financial impact as well as network build-up.
MaltaHip has been in the making for a number of years through various collaborations, including with Empav Engineering Ltd, one of the leading manufacturing engineering companies in Malta, who machined the first prototypes of the MaltaHip to the highest machining standards, and with MCL Components Ltd, who was a partner on the MaltHip project funded by the Malta Council for Science and Technology through Fusion: The R&I Technology Development Programme 2016 (R&I-2015-023T).
