Today, many patients are already benefiting from natural implants in their bones, made from RATTAN, thanks to a revolutionary all-Italian discovery led by Faenza researcher Anna Tampieri. In one or two years' time, once it has obtained FDA certification, the device will be made available to the global market.

"This approach can without a doubt be considered to be a choice that respects the concepts of sustainability, even though it was chosen for different reasons. Indeed, our goal was to create chemically bio-active implants that are able to communicate with human cells, and at the same time have a hierarchically organised structure that mimics that of natural bones, guaranteeing superior biomechanical properties and allowing us to regenerate long sections of load-bearing bones such as leg and arm bones.

I maintain that the great intuition we had was taking something that nature was already producing, and using it as a structure/template to be transformed through heterogeneous chemical reactions until it reaches the same chemical composition as our bones, without changing the complex 3D structure of the original wood.
Following the concepts of biomimetics that I mentioned before, the cells in our body can recognise the implant as tissue belonging to their kind, so they metabolise it and remodel it, creating a new bone that repairs the defect. Alongside this idea, what was fundamental was determination and consistency in transforming the idea into innovation, following the entire complex path of translation necessary for an invention to become a product."

What artificial intelligence tools permitted the development of your technology?

Speaking of artificial intelligence, I am convinced that it is unlikely that the inventive, intuitive capacities of humans can be replaced by a machine for the creation of an idea that generates an invention, but combining artificial intelligence with the potential of the human mind can certainly make the innovation much more perfectible, and transform it more quickly into a product.
The efficiency of artificial intelligence in integrating and processing enormous amounts of information and data allows us to engage with a much larger amount of available experimental data and leads us more quickly towards the optimal, most competitive choices at a global level.

In your opinion, what symbolic meaning does your discovery have if we think about being able to connect more and more with nature as living organisms? What regeneration of cultural perspectives does it entail?

"I think that nature should undoubtedly be our starting point, and it is our task to look humbly at what nature, this "marvellous engineer", is able to do, since it has managed to optimise technologies and products through the ages with properties and intelligent functions that we still cannot achieve with our artificial products."

What contribution do you think artificial intelligence combined with nature can offer to the health of new generations in the medical-scientific field, and what might eventually be its limits?

"New generations will be able to aim for very much superior, more precise goals in much shorter time frames, if they know how to combine the experience we inherit from nature with the efficiency and increased processing capacities of artificial intelligence, which can interact with multiple databases in the external world and perform problem solving in all areas of knowledge.

Much of what scientists are searching for has already been invented by nature, but it happens that nature has used it in a different application from that of the problem the researcher is exploring a solution for, so another very important point is to develop the capacity to transfer ideas and technologies into completely different contexts - this is a task that is ideal for artificial intelligence, and this is the great power that today's scientists hold."