Post by Peter Wahl

It is with a great pleasure that I may announce that the Swiss National Science Foundation SNSF accepted to support entirely our project "Comprehensive analysis of determinants of polyethylene wear and the related tissue response to improve outcomes in total hip arthroplasty", which Ferda Canbaz, Markus Fürstner, Roman Heuberger, Robin Pourzal and I had submitted. Now the funding of our lab work is ensured for the coming years. We will define the material properties, the determinants of wear and quantify the tissue reaction to wear particles. Considering our preliminary results, there will be quite some interesting stuff to come! Many many thanks to all the collaborators who are or will be contributing retrievals to this study, particularly to those who also made the submissions to the ethical committees. Also many thanks to those who supported this project with their invaluable expertise. In alphabetical order, and I hope to forget nobody: Georg-Antonio Bernecker, Marc Bohner, Prof Dr. med. Martin Clauss, Corina Dommann-Scherrer, Bernd Fink Prof. Dr. med., PD Dr. med. Tilman Graulich, Karina Hackl, Deborah J. Hall, Dr. med. Sebastian Hardt, Jochen G. Hofstaetter, Hannes Kuttner, Gabriela von Lewinski, Darius Marti, Prof. Andrej M. Nowakowski, MD, BSc, PhD, Carsten Perka, Valerio Porrati, Florian Sax, Michel Sebastian Schlaeppi, Sebastian Simon, Karl Stoffel, E. Bailey Terhune, MD, Martina Winkelmann, Ralph Zettl. If any revision arthroplasty surgeon wants to contribute to this fascinating project, please contact me. We are looking for more centres to participate. The more retrievals we get, the more we will get out of the analysis. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to define and compare all the polyethylenes used in total hip arthroplasty, as well as to define once with sufficient statistical power the determinants of wear. There will be many interesting results to come!