A D V A N C E D M A T E R I A L S & P R O C E S S E S | A P R I L 2 0 2 1 5 0 COVID’S IMPACT ONSMST AND THE MEDICAL DEVICE COMMUNITY As some readers may be aware, there’s a virus going around. It’s doubtful that there are any industries, professional organizations, or scientific meetings unaffected by COVID-19. Nitinol production and research remains dominated by medical device procedures such as heart valve repair and replacement, stenting, aneurism repair, and the like. These procedures are generally critical to life, so our industry has been impacted less than most. Still, Nitinol is also extensively used in diagnostic and elective procedures, which are being delayed both by patients and caregivers. A very informal poll of Nitinol medical device CEOs indicates a 10-20% decline in 2020 revenue versus pre-pandemic levels, both in Europe and the United States. At the same time, there is confidence that things will return to normal, and unfortunately, perhaps even see a “bounce” because many patients will undoubtedly return with more advanced disease states. While the impact to revenues is small compared to many other industries, the effect on professional and scientific activities has been more pronounced. In-person lab activities have been severely cut back at most industrial and academic institutions, as have many live teaching events. The ICOMAT conference, which in many ways is the precursor to the SMST conferences, has been postponed to midMarch of 2022 (https://www.icomat2020.org/). The joint SMST-AeroMat event originally scheduled for May 2020 was cancelled entirely, and the SMST meeting originally scheduled for May 2021 has now been postponed to May of 2022, still to be held in San Diego (https://www.asminternational. org/web/smst-2022). Despite that, the SMST board has decided to proceed with the $50,000 Founders’ Grant as originally planned. The Grant Selection Committee received fifteen submissions this year and after a great deal of debate decided to award the grant to William LePage of the University of Tulsa for his proposed work on elucidating the role of inclusions on fatigue crack nucleation, certainly a topic of great interest to the medical community. Perhaps indicative of where our industry focus lies, six of the submissions focus on high temperature Nitinol (Hf,Zr) alloys, and five of those pertain to additive manufacturing. And speaking of fatigue, the CardioVascular Implant Durability (CVID) conference intends to press forward with its October 11-13, 2021 dates (https://cvidconference.org/), but will likely offer virtual as well as in-person registration options. The founders of the CVID conference wish to point out that its highly successful debut conference (CVID-2019) literally went viral (at least in name). We hope to duplicate the success of the 2019 event and convince search engines that it isn’t simply a typo for “COVID.” Tom Duerig, FASM Board Member and Co-founder, International Organization on Shape Memory and Superelastic Technologies Organizing Committee Member, SMST 2022 GUEST EDITORIAL Duerig 2
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