Dr Christopher Jeffery

Infection is a significant and predominantly unanswered problem in orthopaedics, and infection management is difficult because surgery changes the functionality of the local environment.

To address this, Dr Chris Jeffery combined knowledge from material scientists and physicists specialising in antimicrobial diffusion to create TriFix, a patented, bioactive smart-coating technology applied in cement form or as a direct implant coating.

TriFix releases dual agent antibiotics at an operative site for broad spectrum cover and resistance prevention. Effective from the first hour of surgery to six weeks into the healing process, it is a solution to the orthopaedics infection challenge.

Jeffery is a doctor, engineer and researcher with a long history of research and development. The idea for TriFix came from his work collaborating on the release of chemotherapeutic drugs from biodegradable scaffolds in post-cancer breast reconstructions.

That process uses pharmaceutical agents in biodegradable polymers and, by putting them in the human body, allows drugs to be released at the operative site.

In Jeffery’s breast work, this involves mixing polymer in liquid form that is then moulded to a breast implant and inserted.

That work led Jeffery to review the technology related to the management of site infection in orthopaedics, where this problem causes too many patients to suffer from life-threatening outcomes. He concluded that a local solution was best for the drug release to fix infection at its site.