How It All Started: Mobelife (Materialize)
In October 2008 at 27-years-old, I was just finishing my PhD in biomedical engineering at KU Leuven and was looking for my next step. I had focused much of my doctorate research on patient-specific planning for cranio-maxillofacial surgery and my colleague Frederik was also finishing up his doctorate degree with a focus on patient-specific implants for orthopedics.
Frederik and I didn’t know quite what to expect when we pitched a new business idea to Materialise about implants that are perfectly adapted to a patient’s anatomy. We were already very familiar with Materialise’s image processing software Mimics, and we would even perform beta testing on new releases from time to time, but proposing a new business to be included in the Materialise Group is a whole different level.
We couldn’t have expected a better meeting. Materialise’s CEO Fried Vancraen was interested in the idea and soon enough, Mobelife became part of the Materialise Group. What we envisioned was to provide a solution, not only an implant. This means that we were starting with the patient image data through the image processing software Mimics and would the...
