Masmec grows with biomedical

Having become a national champion during the Covid emergency because it was chosen by Prime Minister Draghi for his first institutional visit to the South, today the biomedical division of Masmec in Bari continues to be a point of reference, also internationally, in the design and manufacture of high-tech devices that facilitate the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of diseases.

In October 2021, Mario Draghi consecrated the efforts of this company, which - founded in 1998 by Michele Vinci and active in engineering excellence and grown in automation, automotive and digital - had then launched, in 2007, a biomedical division in which, in the midst of the Covid emergency, a platform would be developed in record time to accelerate the diagnosis of Covid 19, through the automatic extraction of RNA from swabs. In the post-Covid era, innovation in the biomedical division has never stopped, with a growing weight in the Masmec spa group, which today employs 290 people, with an average age of 34, mainly engineers, biologists, physicists, but also young people, 18% of the total employed, from the post-diploma courses of the ITS Cuccovillo in Bari. The 2024 production value of almost 50 million, one-fifth of which is generated by Masmec Biomed, which also makes continuous investments in r&s, to the extent that it has so far obtained funding for 50 projects and filed 27 patents.

The innovation at Masmec Biomed relates to interventional radiology - with the first navigators made fifteen years ago - and surgery. In the former, thanks to virtual navigation, the Sirio and Eco nav systems assist in diagnosis and therapy when performing biopsies, thermoablations, cryoablations, spine treatments, and joint infiltrations. Based on X-ray images, Sirio reconstructs the three-dimensional model of the patient's anatomical district, enabling the physician to identify the optimal trajectory of infiltration of the needle or other interventional instrument and to visualise its progression in real time. Econav is another navigator that, by merging real-time ultrasound images with previous ones, offers a multimodal navigation environment, increasing the information available to the physician. And then there is Pyxis, which guides and holds the surgeon's hand during spinal stabilisation operations. Now its further evolution is on track with Modus-P with market entry expected in 2026. It is a robot-assisted spinal fixation system consisting of screws and rods made of biocompatible titanium alloy. The division has been working on it for about five years, in collaboration with a number of hospitals, including Lucca, and it allows the doctor, by means of a collaborative anthropomorphic arm controlled by a navigation module, to plan the operation by positioning virtual screws with a surgical tool (the screwdriver) that has sensors thanks to which it is always possible to observe the advancement of the screw inside the vertebra. "These screws," explains Daniela Vinci, Masmec's CEO, "have a special head and screwing, which we have patented, and the whole system is undergoing clinical investigation, which should allow us to launch it on the market in 2026. Other novelties on navigators, the result of collaboration with the Besta in Milan, concern those dedicated to the cerebral district, with software that makes it possible to investigate inaccessible spaces. There is a new project on the horizon - innovating both navigation systems and DNA extraction processes, in order to make diagnoses and investigate diseases whose nature and type are to be ascertained - for which a new programme contract could be applied to the Apulia Region.