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 Unlike real bone grafts, the synthetic material - called
hyper-elastic bone - is able to regenerate bone without the need for
added growth factors, is flexible and strong, and can be easily and
rapidly deployed in the operating room.
Giving details in a teleconference, the scientists said the results
of their animal trials - published on Wednesday in the Science
Translational Medicine journal - were "quite astounding".
Human trials could begin with five years, they said.
The team found that when used in spinal injuries in rodents and to
mend the skull of a monkey, the hyper-elastic bone, made mostly of a
ceramic and polymer, quickly integrated with surrounding tissue and
began regenerating bone.
It swiftly mended bones in the spines of the rats and healed the
monkey's skull in just four weeks, with no signs of infection or
other side effects, the scientists said.
"Another unique property ... is that it's highly porous and
absorbent - and this is important for cell and tissue integration,"
said Ramille Shah of Northwestern University's department of
material science, engineering and surgery, who co-led the work.
"Even when it’s deformed or squeezed into a space, it still
maintains high porosity, and this is also very important for blood
vessels to infiltrate the scaffold so that it can further support
cell and tissue growth."
Other types of bone grafts currently in development are often too
brittle to be shaped and handled by surgeons, and risk being
rejected once inside the body, or may be too expensive or difficult
to manufacture for widespread use.
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With this hyper-elastic bone, however, many of those issues would be
overcome, said Adam Jakus, Shah's co-researcher at Northwestern
University.
"It's purely synthetic, very cheap and very easy to make," he said.
"It can be packaged, shipped and stored very nicely."
Shah she hoped these properties would mean patients in developing
countries would also benefit.
"There are a lot of pediatric patients, especially in third world
countries, who are born with orthopedic or Maxillofacial(face and
jaw bone) defects," she said. "And because the hyper-elastic bone is
scalable at a low cost, (we hope) it would be accessible to those
types of patients."
(Editing by Jeremy Gaunt)
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