For the interactive website biomaterials.org.uk, developed and hosted by Healthware, April has seen the launch of its most enterprising initiative thus far. The very latest capabilities of the Internet have been harnessed to provide a first online keynote presentation for the portal website which was established to better connect the biomaterials and medical devices sector in the UK.

This first online presentation is: The Response to Wear Debris from Orthopaedic Implants, by Professor Peter Revell of the Royal Free and University College Medical School in London. Professor Revell was most recently president of the European Society for Biomaterials and is a world-renowned expert on the biological mechanisms of failure of orthopaedic joint replacement implants.

At major conferences, keynote lectures provide an essential element where an expert provides an overview of current understanding from which new developments might emerge. The online keynote presentation does exactly this same job in the form of a high quality review of the current scientific state-of-the-art. However, the latest Internet systems give an extra dimension, as the presentation can be halted and restarted at any point, moving backwards and forwards through the presentation to fully access the understanding provided by the presenter.

Dr John Egan from biomaterials.org.uk said, "This concept of the online keynote presentation is taking the famous academic lecture and re-packaging it in a form that is accessible to a broader audience, without diminishing the quality of the scientific content. This first example is a genuinely ground-breaking presentation that shows the way scientific information will be disseminated in the future."

For further information go to: Biomaterials.org.uk