🇨🇦 Nicolas Fedrigo

The problem

Spinal fusion joins vertebrae together, and it is held in place by screws driven into bone the surgeon cannot see directly. The margin is narrow, and what sits beside the bone is the spinal cord and the nerve roots leaving it.

The figure cited at the Dublin ceremony gives the scale of the risk: 29 per cent of procedures result in accidental damage that can cause paralysis. That number, as reported, is the reason the project existed — not an abstract engineering exercise but a redesign aimed at a known failure rate.

The redesign

Fedrigo's project was a redesigned tool to direct screw placement during the operation. The account published from the contest describes the purpose rather than the mechanism; it does not give the device's geometry, materials, testing protocol or any clinical evaluation.

What can be said is that judges at Europe's flagship pre-university science contest ranked it among the three best projects of the year, in a field where the competition included an autonomous vehicle and a new protective material. Medical-device entries are judged on the same criteria as everything else: originality, method and the candidate's ability to defend the work.

Instrument design is one of the few corners of surgery where an outsider can still make progress without a laboratory. The constraints are geometric and mechanical, the failure mode is well described in the literature, and a prototype can be evaluated on a bench before anyone discusses an operating theatre. That is what makes it a plausible project for a seventeen-year-old and a difficult one to carry beyond a prototype.

The contest

EUCYS 2018 was staged at Dublin Castle, with winners announced on 18 September. It brought 139 students from 38 countries, presenting 90 projects, each of them a national competition winner before arriving.

Three first prizes of €7,000 were awarded. Fedrigo shared the top tier with his compatriot Brendon Matusch, 15, whose entry was an autonomous vehicle controlled by neural networks, and with the German siblings Adrian and Anna Amelie Fleck, whose FleckProtec is a starch-based liquid that stiffens into flexible body protection. Second and third prizes went to entrants from France, Estonia, Portugal, Georgia, South Korea and China.

The reaction

European Commissioner Carlos Moedas marked the result with a line that has been used at many such ceremonies: "It's encouraging to see so much talent in these young researchers and innovators. They are Europe's future."

For a medical device, the more interesting judgement is what happens after a contest — whether a redesign is tested, refined and adopted, which takes years and regulatory work that no science fair can supply. Nothing in this record describes that next stage.

What is documented — and what is not

Firm: the first prize and its value, his age, his country, the date and venue, the subject of the project and the 29 per cent figure as reported at the contest.

Open: his school and province, the technical design, any prototype testing, any patent, and what he has done since September 2018. None of it appears in the sources gathered for this page, and nothing is supplied here to fill the gap.