Q&A: How an AI suite can help develop new materials faster

Med-Tech Innovation News spoke to Nhon Vo, co-founder of materials science AI suite Amatrium, to find out more about the role it can play in the medical device sector. 

Give us some insight into Amatrium – where did the idea come from?

Amatrium was founded out of frustration of how manual the materials industry and materials development process still are in the advancement of data transformation and AI in other fields, including eCommerce, finance, electronic devices, and others. Amatrium co-founders are a group of entrepreneurs, materials inventors, and AI experts who realised this gap and have a vision and capability to solve it.

What can you offer to the medical device sector? 

The creation of new materials with improved properties enables medical devices to perform better and provides more functionality than before. We have seen this happen in the development of 3D-printed implants and biomaterials in recent years as a few examples. The Materials Science AI Suite from Amatrium enables materials engineers and scientists to develop new materials many times faster compared with traditional methods. It means the next major medical materials breakthroughs could happen a few years sooner than would otherwise occur, which is a big deal.

Given the use of AI, how does Amatrium actually work?

Amatrium team gathers a large amount of materials science knowledge from expert sources across the world continuously. Several AI tools, such as natural language processing and text mining, are embedded in this knowledge gathering to speed up the process. Then we develop sophisticated algorithms and models, using state-of-the-art data science to extract patterns and correlations of the gathered knowledge. Finally, we 'visualise' such information in multiple dimensions, in more ways than what our human brain is capable of. With that capability at their fingertips, engineers and scientists can extract valuable insights into an existing material or predict the performance of a new material even before creating it in a matter of seconds. All of this is packed in our Materials Science AI Suite, accelerating the creation of a new material for any application, including the medical device sector.

What kind of effects do you think this kind of product can have on the medical device supply chain?

When we speed up the development of a new material for medical devices, the supply chain suddenly has more materials choices for the same function. This creates vast flexibility for the supply chain, especially when a particular material is in shortage. At this time of supply chain disruption in almost every product worldwide due to COVID-19, flexibility in the supply chain is even more critical. It will help prevent the interruption of medical device manufacturing because of a material shortage somewhere in the chain.

Anything else you’d like to add?

We encourage materials engineers and scientists in the medical device sector to reach out to us to explore how our Materials Science AI Suite can help them become superstars at work and accelerate discovery and breakthroughs in medical devices.