Crustacean Shell with Polyester Creates Mixed-Fiber Material for Nerve Repair
Researchers have created a promising new material that could support nerve repair by mixing chitosan (found in shellfish) with polycaprolactone, a commercial biodegradable polyester used in sutures. They have captured biologically desirable qualities from both by melding them together. Polycaprolactone is strong, flexible, and biodegradable. Chitosan is cheap, readily available, biodegradable, and biocompatible. The combination produces a material that is biocompatible, stable in solution, resistant to collapse and pliable.
After a peripheral nerve-severing injury, the nerve endings will continue to grow. Surgeons must join these two pieces together for the patient to regain control. This becomes quite difficult in large gaps, and surgeons currently use nerve guides which direct the two fragments back together. Nerve guides are made of collagen, which has several disadvantages. Collagen is expensive, weak in wet environments, and tends to elicit an immune response when implemented.
Tests show significant improvements with prototype hybrid nerve guides created from this new material. The chitosan-polyester blend required two times as much force to push the tube halfway shut as polylacticcoglycolic acid (another biomaterial under study), and eight times as much as the collagen tube. The new material has highly outperformed collagen mechanically, in addition to being more biocompatible and cheaper to manufacture. While this new material improves upon current nerve guides, it would also work well for wound dressing, ligaments, cartilage, muscle repair, and heart grafts.
Human beings are highly specialized. As a result, the solutions we engineer for tissue repair must accomplish a very specific function as well as coexist with the machinery already in place. In many cases, a synthetic solution may have several positive aspects along with other negative ones. As our treatments become more sophisticated, we can create material with specific properties required for any given job by improving and combining preexisting substances. These results are significant because they show us that even more specialized material can be created in order to better address the problem at hand.
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=5700
After a peripheral nerve-severing injury, the nerve endings will continue to grow. Surgeons must join these two pieces together for the patient to regain control. This becomes quite difficult in large gaps, and surgeons currently use nerve guides which direct the two fragments back together. Nerve guides are made of collagen, which has several disadvantages. Collagen is expensive, weak in wet environments, and tends to elicit an immune response when implemented.
Tests show significant improvements with prototype hybrid nerve guides created from this new material. The chitosan-polyester blend required two times as much force to push the tube halfway shut as polylacticcoglycolic acid (another biomaterial under study), and eight times as much as the collagen tube. The new material has highly outperformed collagen mechanically, in addition to being more biocompatible and cheaper to manufacture. While this new material improves upon current nerve guides, it would also work well for wound dressing, ligaments, cartilage, muscle repair, and heart grafts.
Human beings are highly specialized. As a result, the solutions we engineer for tissue repair must accomplish a very specific function as well as coexist with the machinery already in place. In many cases, a synthetic solution may have several positive aspects along with other negative ones. As our treatments become more sophisticated, we can create material with specific properties required for any given job by improving and combining preexisting substances. These results are significant because they show us that even more specialized material can be created in order to better address the problem at hand.
http://insciences.org/article.php?article_id=5700
posted by Jason George at 6:55 PM
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