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Natural hydrogel may boost spinal cord healing

September 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, Sep 18 (ANI): A jab of biomaterial gel into a spinal cord injury site may significantly improve healing, according to researchers at the Barrow Neurological Institute at St. Joseph’s Hospital and Medical Center.

Dr. Mark Preul and Dr. Alyssa Panitch have found in a study that injection of an engineered hydrogel made up mainly of hyaluronic acid (a naturally-occurring body substance) into the spinal cord injury site decreases scarring, and promotes a realignment of the spinal cord fibres around the injury site.

The hyaluronic acid, which forms a scaffold-like configuration may help to structurally stabilize the spinal cord injury site.

The researchers traced cells in the brain stem after injury, and found much higher levels in the hydrogel treated animals as compared to animals that did not receive the treatment, and approached nearly normal levels.

Treated animals had higher functional scores than their non-treated counterparts.

“Spinal cord injury is devastating to civilian and military populations – especially to the young. There has been little progress toward paradigms of regeneration and few results that show real, sustained functional recovery. We’ve been so pre-occupied with regeneration, but that is a highly complicated and difficult to define goal. This project is a synergy of neurosurgeons and bioengineers that attempts repair of the SCI lesion cavity using a tissue-engineering biomaterials approach,” says Preul.

He added that the team aimed at finding ways to structurally allow the body to better heal itself.

“In this project we did not add anything to the hyaluronic acid. It may be that adding growth factors or cells into the gel matrix may allow even better results,” he said.

Preul said that the results show “we may be on a practical path that can give hope to the many people who suffer this sort of injury.”

The work was presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons in San Diego where it won the Synthes Prize for Spine Research. (ANI)

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Crabs, shrimp’s shells pave way for natural material to repair severed nerves

June 20, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, June 20 (ANI): Researchers at the University of Washington have found that mixing chitosan, found in the shells of crabs and shrimp, with an industrial polyester creates a promising new material for the tiny tubes that support repair of a severed nerve, and could serve other medical uses.

The researchers say that the hybrid fibre combines the biologically favourable qualities of the natural material with the mechanical strength of the synthetic polymer.

“A nerve guide requires very strict conditions. It needs to be biocompatible, stable in solution, resistant to collapse and also pliable, so that surgeons can suture it to the nerve. This turns out to be very difficult,” said Miqin Zhang, a UW professor of material science and engineering and lead author of a paper now available online in the journal Advanced Materials.

The researchers combined polycaprolactone-a strong, flexible, biodegradable polyester commonly used in sutures-with chitosan at the nanometre scale by first using a technique called electrospinning, and then weaved the fibres together.

Zhang and colleagues reveal that the resulting material had a texture similar to that of the nano-sized fibres of the connective tissue that surrounds human cells.

They highlight the fact that the two materials are different and are difficult to blend, but proper mixing is crucial because imperfectly blended fibres have weak points.

The team tested a guide made from the chitosan-polyester blend against another biomaterial under study, polylacticcoglycolic acid, and a commercially available collagen guide.

Of the three materials, the chitosan-polyester weave showed the most consistent performance for strength, flexibility and resistance to compression under both dry and wet conditions.

According to the researchers, under wet conditions, similar to those inside the body, the chitosan-polyester blend required twice as much force to push the tube halfway shut as the other biomaterial, and eight times as much force as the collagen tube.

Zhang said that the new material, though showed promise for nerve guides, might also work well for wound dressings, heart grafts, tendons, ligament, cartilage, muscle repair, and other biomedical applications. (ANI)

Filed Under: Health News Tagged With: advanced materials, biomaterial, chitosan, connective tissue, consistent performance, eight times, fibres, human cells, hybrid fibre, industrial polyester, material science, mechanical strength, Medical Uses, Miqin Zhang, nanometre scale, natural material, Strict Conditions, sutures, synthetic polymer, tiny tubes, wet conditions

Pentagon planning to regrow human limbs

March 29, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Washington, March 27 (ANI): Scientists at the Pentagon have completed the first phase of their plan to regrow soldiers’ limbs, by turning human skin into the equivalent of a blastema – a mass of undifferentiated cells that can develop into new body parts.

Now, researchers are on to phase two: turning that cellular glop into a square inch of honest-to-goodness muscle tissue.

The Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) just got a one-year, 570,000 dollars grant from Darpa, the Pentagon’s blue-sky research arm, to grow the new tissues.

“The goal is to genuinely replace a muscle that’s lost,” biotechnology professor Raymond Page tells Danger Room. “I appreciate that’s a very aggressive goal,” he added.

According to Page, it’s only one part in a larger, even more ambitious Darpa program, Restorative Injury Repair, which aims to “fully restore the function of complex tissue (muscle, nerves, skin) after traumatic injury on the battlefield.”

Muscles are famous for their ability to regenerate. They’re broken down and rebuilt with every gym workout.

But when too much of a muscle is lost – either from injury or illness – “instead of the regenerative response, you get scarring,” Page said.

He’s hoping to get a different result, by carefully growing fresh muscle, outside the body.

Step one will be trying to get those undifferentiated cells to turn into something like muscle cells. That means making sure the cells have myosin and actin – two proteins that are key to forming the cellular cytoskeleton, and to building muscle filaments.

Then, Page and his team will try to get those cells to form around a scaffolding of tiny threads, made of biomaterial. (ANI)

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Now, a biomaterial to rebuild broken bones

February 19, 2009 By admin Leave a Comment

Melbourne, Feb 19 (ANI): In a major breakthrough towards rebuilding broken bones, Aussie scientists have created a synthetic biomaterial that encourages the body to create bone on its own.

The biomaterial created by researchers at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and Stryker Australia could probe top be an answer to successful bone grafts and treating bone disease.

Dr Cameron Lutton of QUT said that the biomaterial activates the initial stages of bone healing by encouraging the body’s natural clotting process, thus promoting bone growth.

“The biomaterial interacts with blood and mimics early bone healing events,” ABC Online quoted Lutton as saying.

When a bone is broken, a fast inflammatory response comes into action where blood clots and specialised cells are quickly attracted to the fracture site, encouraging a cascade of proteins, hormones and other cells to create new bone.

However, the natural process fails to occur if the gap is too large, due to a large break or removal of a tumour.

“If the chunk of bone missing is too big it can’t heal, this is the circumstance that people need assistance,” said Lutton.

Although researchers use bone grafts or synthetic materials to assist in the healing process, but even they have their limitations.

But, the new biomaterial created by QUT researchers scores over all these methods because of its surface structure, which is coated by a special arrangement of polymers that attract the right proteins to the wounded bone, said Dr Ben Goss project researcher.

“There are polymers that attract proteins and those that repel them. By getting the right balance we can attract and repel the right proteins to create bones,” said Goss.

In laboratory conditions, the biomaterial induces the proteins and hormones needed for the initial inflammatory response.

“We know that it does the right thing to the blood to begin bone regeneration,” said Goss.

Currently animal trials of the biomaterial are undergoing, which if successful, may lead to human trials to treat patients with significant bone defects.(ANI)

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Natural hydrogel may boost spinal cord healing

Crabs, shrimp’s shells pave way for natural material to repair severed nerves

Pentagon planning to regrow human limbs

Now, a biomaterial to rebuild broken bones

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