Doctors may soon be able to super glue bones together
Typically when it comes to repairing badly shattered or broken bones in the human body doctors have use all kinds of pins, plates and screws to hold everything in place until the body can naturally mend itself. While this is okay for major types of breaks it gets increasingly difficult to hold everything together the smaller, or fragile, the bones get. That may all change with the announcement by some researchers today that they have discovered a new glue that has the sticking power to adhere to bones.
That might not seem all that difficult but in fact making a glue that can stick to bones and other wet surfaces is a very complex problem. Normally glue will either slide off the bones or it will dissolve into the surrounding liquid. The solution for the problem was once again found in nature and a little sandcastle worm. You see the sandcastle worm lives on the bottom of the ocean floor where it builds it’s tube like home using sand grains and bits of shell that are cemented into place by a type of glue it creates.
“The worm has to overcome several problems when putting a sandcastle together underwater,” Stewart says. “Its adhesive has to adhere to wet surfaces, and when it’s secreting that adhesive under water, it has to prevent it from just dissolving into the ocean.” Although the glue starts out as fluid, it must harden into a solid. “The worm has solved all of these problems, and we’re trying to copy those solutions,” he says.
Source: Technology Review :: Bone-setting Glue
What lead researcher and biomedical engineer Russell Stewart from the University of Utah have done is found a way to recreate a synthetic version of the worm’s adhesive that is at least as strong as Super Glue and from early testing doesn’t cause toxicity in testing done with rats.
While there are already medical grade adhesives available they tend to be highly inflammatory and this causes problems when you need to align small fragments of bone without causing inflammation.
Stewart and his colleagues believe the adhesive can be used as a complement to wires, pins, and plates–large pieces could be held in place with hardware, while small pieces could be glued back in. And in cranial-facial fractures, where using pins and screws can cause permanent cosmetic damage, the glue could potentially be injected with a syringe, avoiding open surgery.
“One of our challenges is to hold very small pieces in very precise alignment. We just need to hold them there until they heal, just six weeks,” says Thomas Higgins, an orthopedic surgeon at the University of Utah’s School of Medicine who specializes in joint fractures and has consulted with Stewart on the adhesive’s clinical applications. “To have something that is liquid and would assume a more rigid state when you put it [in the body], that would be much more easily applicable and much more versatile than what we use now,” he says. “This is still preliminary, but it shows a lot of promise.”
Source: Technology Review :: Bone-setting Glue
Video link to see how a little sandcastle worm provided all this inspiration
