The Oxford Nerve Conduit

Every year, over half a million people in the EU undergo surgery for peripheral nerve injuries—damage to nerves outside the brain and spinal cord caused by trauma, surgery, or cancer. The current gold-standard treatment, called an autograft, requires surgeons to sacrifice a healthy nerve from elsewhere in the patient’s body to act as a donor, causing additional harm. This approach often fails over large gaps, and recovery is poor: fewer than half of patients regain good motor or sensory function, and up to 12% need revision surgery. The average patient is just 32 years old, and many face lifelong disability. The Oxford Nerve Conduit project aims to develop a synthetic alternative that could replace the need for donor nerves, potentially improving recovery rates and reducing the economic burden of acute treatment. If successful, this device would change a standard surgical procedure that has remained largely unchanged for decades, offering a direct improvement to the lives of hundreds of thousands of working-age adults each year.