Nobel Biocare

Nobel Biocare is a company that manufactures dental implants and CAD/CAM-based individualized prosthetics and is headquartered in Kloten, Switzerland near the Zürich Airport. Nobel Biocare in its current form was founded in 2002. It originates in a partnership formed in 1978 between Swedish medical researcher Professor Per-Ingvar Brånemark and Bofors, a Swedish company, to industrialize Brånemark’s discovery of osseointegration (the fusing of titanium with bone) Nobel Biocare is listed at the SIX Swiss Exchange.

The core business of the company is the manufacture of dental implants and related products used to treat tooth loss, such as abutments, crowns and bridges. The company also sells scanners and software for designing individualized, patient-specific prosthetics. Nobel Biocare also develops software for diagnostics and implant treatment planning, and produces customized, patient-specific, guided-surgery templates for implant placement surgeries. Since the legal training requirements for clinicians who carry out implant treatment vary from country to country, Nobel Biocare runs a training and education program for dental professionals in several countries.

In 1978, the Swedish health authorities approved the insertion of dental implants for clinical purposes, and Brånemark entered into a partnership with Bofors to industrialize his ideas and bring them to a broader market. A new company, Bofors Nobelpharma (later Nobelpharma), was founded in 1981 in Gothenburg, Sweden to commercialize Professor Brånemark’s findings. The company launched a number of new products including abutments, drilling equipment and an instrument kit. In 1982, Brånemark presented his results at the Toronto Conference on Osseointegration in Clinical Dentistry. In the same year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the use of titanium dental implants in the United States. In 1983, Dr. Matts Andersson developed the Procera® System of high-precision, repeatable manufacturing of dental crowns. This was a fully automated method for the industrial CAD/CAM production of dental prosthetics. Nobelpharma acquired the new technology in 1988.