What Became of Mimetis's EIC Accelerator 3D-Printed Bone Grafts

The website of Mimetis Biomaterials now opens with a single notice: "The manufacturer Mimetis Biomaterials S.L. has permanently ceased operations. No medical devices are being manufactured, advertised, or placed on the market." The page says it only provides safety information for products already sold in the EU, and that post-market surveillance of those products is now handled by Matricel GmbH in Herzogenrath, Germany. The notice was not there in an Internet Archive copy of 13 March 2026 and was in the copy of 13 April 2026; the site's own publishing data dates the last change of the page to 20 March 2026.

Seven years earlier, Mimetis, a Barcelona spin-off of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), was among the winners of the 9 January 2019 cut-off of the EIC SME Instrument Phase 2, the Horizon 2020 forerunner of today's EIC Accelerator. Its project, Bone3Dmatch, was to bring 3D-printed synthetic bone grafts, shaped to each patient's anatomy, to orthopaedic and cranio-maxillofacial surgeons. The company is the only one named for the project in the European Commission's list of 2019 SME Instrument Phase 2 winners, and the EU contribution was €795,839.80 towards a €1,136,914 project, according to CORDIS. Between the grant and the closure, the dental implant maker Nobel Biocare became the company's sole owner.

A Shut-Down Company That Still Exists on Paper

The closure notice is the company's own statement, and no press report, Nobel Biocare announcement or register entry could be found that explains when or why operations stopped. The Spanish companies register tells a slightly different story: according to Empresia, which reproduces the entries of the Boletín Oficial del Registro Mercantil, Mimetis is still an active company, its last filed accounts are for 2024, and no dissolution, liquidation or insolvency has been recorded. Infoempresa also lists it at its Barcelona address, with a last register publication on 8 August 2025.

The last register entries point to a company being wound down by its owner rather than run. On 30 May 2025 a group of new general attorneys was registered, among them PricewaterhouseCoopers Tax & Legal SL, and on 1 August 2025 the register recorded the revocation of the powers of Ana Chinea, who had coordinated Bone3Dmatch and held powers of attorney since 2018, according to Empresia. Mimetis has therefore shut down its business without, so far, being dissolved. This article treats it as closed on the strength of its own announcement.

The Technology: Bone Mineral Made at Body Temperature

Bone is the second most transplanted tissue after blood, with more than 2 million grafting procedures a year worldwide, according to the Bone3Dmatch final report. Surgeons can take bone from the patient, from a bone bank or from animals, usually cattle. Each source has drawbacks: a second operation, the risk of disease transmission or immune reactions, and ethical concerns. Synthetic substitutes avoid these, but the report argues that most "lack clinical efficacy", and that patient-specific implants are usually made of materials foreign to the body.

Mimetis's answer came out of the UPC biomaterials group led by Maria Pau Ginebra. Most synthetic calcium phosphate grafts are sintered at very high temperatures, which makes them hard and dense. Mimetis instead set its material in water at low temperature, imitating how bone mineral forms, so that the result is a calcium-deficient hydroxyapatite with a large inner surface and pores at several scales. Its product pages describe MimetikOss granules as 80% calcium-deficient hydroxyapatite and 20% beta-tricalcium phosphate, and the 3D-printed version as at least 60% hydroxyapatite and at most 40% beta-tricalcium phosphate, "not sintered". Bone3Dmatch added the printing: engineers design a graft from the patient's CT images, and the company promised a finished, patient-specific part within 72 hours of the surgeon approving the design.

What Bone3Dmatch Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

Bone3Dmatch ran from 1 May 2019 to 30 September 2022, according to CORDIS. Its objective promised that the 3D-printed grafts would reach the market in 2020 and bring in €4.9 million of revenue within three years. In April 2019, as the project started, Mimetis said it was raising a €2 million round, of which €800,000 was covered by the EU grant, to enter orthopaedics and launch the personalised 3D-printed product, according to Catalonia.health. Whether that round closed is not public; the register shows only one capital increase after it, of €1,633 nominal in May 2021.

The final periodic report says the first period went into a licence to manufacture patient-specific devices, the documentation for a clinical trial and a launch strategy. The second period focused on "starting the clinical trial, obtaining certification as a class III medical device for both product and migration to new medical device regulation", while packaging for orthopaedics was in "the final stages" of validation. A post-market study of the 3D-printed graft in maxillofacial defects, sponsored by Mimetis, was registered with a start in April 2021, 20 planned patients and completion in October 2022. When CORDIS published its results article in February 2023, the data were "still being collected and analysed", and the next steps were to finish the trials, publish the results and commercialise in Europe and the United States.

1. Patient-specific 3D-printed graftDeliveredMimetikOss 3D is described on the company site and was placed on the EU market under the old Medical Devices Directive, per the closure notice.
2. Graft within 72 hoursDeliveredCORDIS reports scaffolds made "in less than 72h" and a scaled-up process.
3. Clinical validationPartlyStudy started in 2021; ClinicalTrials.gov shows status unknown and no results; no publication found.
4. Class III certification under the MDRUnverifiedNamed as a goal in the report; no MDR certificate could be found.
5. Orthopaedic launch and €4.9M revenue in 3 yearsNot achievedNo orthopaedic launch announced; Empresia puts annual sales under €500,000.

On the engineering, Bone3Dmatch did what it set out to do: a custom-printed, unsintered graft exists and was used in a clinical study. On the commercial side, the record does not support the plan. No orthopaedic launch, no published trial result and no revenue figure close to €4.9 million could be found.

The Nobel Biocare Years

On 18 January 2022 the register recorded Nobel Biocare Services AG as Mimetis's sole shareholder. The same entry removed the founders Maria Pau Ginebra, David Pastorino and Xavier Gil, and the corporate board member Pisanlof-One SL, from the board, and replaced the board with two joint administrators, Adrian Marcel Schell and Thomas Fabian, according to Empresia. The UPC biomaterials research centre reported on 9 February 2022 that "the multinational Nobel Biocare has bought the Catalan spin-off" (translated), and CB Insights records the acquisition with that date and undisclosed terms.

Nobel Biocare itself described the relationship differently. In a release dated 30 January 2023, a year after it became the sole owner, it said it had "partnered with" Mimetis to launch creos syntogain, a rebranded version of the MimetikOss granules, which had been sold in Spain since 2016, made in Spain and CE marked. The release names no acquisition, and no purchase price has been published. Nobel Biocare's creos syntogain page still offers the product with a "Buy now" link; who makes it now that Mimetis says it no longer places devices on the market could not be verified.

The post-market surveillance partner named on the closure notice belongs to the same group. Envista, Nobel Biocare's parent company, reported in its annual report for 2021 that it bought all shares of Matricel GmbH on 21 January 2020 for about $43.6 million. Matricel makes collagen membranes for dental bone regeneration. A full-text search of Envista's SEC filings returns no mention of Mimetis.

The Money

CORDIS lists no other EU project for Mimetis. A search of its project database for the company's name returns Bone3Dmatch only.

Why Europe Should Care

Mimetis is a small case study in two European problems. The first is the move from the old Medical Devices Directive to the Medical Device Regulation (MDR). The Bone3Dmatch report names class III certification as the goal for Mimetis's products, and under Regulation (EU) 2023/607 class III devices certified under the old rules may stay on the market until 31 December 2027 only if the manufacturer applied for MDR certification by 26 May 2024, according to Alvamed and Advisera. The EU extended the deadlines because of "the imminent threat of significant shortages" of devices. Mimetis's notice refers only to devices placed on the market under the old directive. Whether the cost of MDR certification for a custom-made class III graft played a part in the closure is not stated anywhere.

The second is where European research spin-offs end up. A technology developed over years at a public Catalan university and pushed to market with EU money is now, as far as public records show, a product line of Nobel Biocare, part of the US-listed Envista group, while the Spanish company that made it has stopped operating. The sale gave the founders and early backers an exit; the manufacturing in Spain that the grant helped to build has, by the company's own account, ended.

The Verdict

Mimetis Biomaterials and Nobel Biocare have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.