Scaling-Up Production of Biopolymer Microthreads

Biomedical engineering faculty and graduate students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute are designing and developing bio polymer microthreads in hope of developing new therapies for many medical conditions.
The idea of developing microthreads initiated as a way to repair the ACL in the knee. Because of the fact that ACL surgery involves removing a section of a healthy tendon from another part of the body and moving it to the knee to replace the ACL, the idea of recreating a scaffold to replace the ACL was ideal.

 Faculty and graduate students began to make the threads out of fibrin in order to mimic the natural structures in the body. They began to make each single thread by hand; this task was very tedious because of the difficulty involved in getting each thread to be the same diameter and length. After the  faculty noticed how inefficient this method was, Professor Pins challenged his students to make a machine that would produce threads. In two years, a group of students developed a prototype that took care of most of the thread production process. However, after that, a graduate student took this project to another level as he became the" lead developer of the production-scale extrusion system now being commissioned." Currently, the threads are being put to use as sutures that will deliver bone marrow-derived adult stem cells to cardiac tissue damaged by trauma. Microthreads cannot only be seeded with new cells in order to regenerate muscle tissue, but can also be used as a muscle-like scaffold to promote healing.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430164401.htm