Biomaterials
efforts to create reliable, safe and effective resorbable polymer implants, with insight from Associate Professor Reece Oosterbeek, engineering science at the University of Oxford, and Professor Paul Hatton from the University of Sheffield’s School of Clinical Dentistry.
Built to disappear I
f you were unlucky enough to suffer a fracture, your clinician might use an implant – like a screw, pin or plate – to hold the bone in place until it heals. Most of the time, these implants are made from metals, such as stainless steel and titanium alloys. There’s plenty to like about using metals: they’re strong and hardy, and have been shown to successfully integrate with the surrounding tissue. But they also have disadvantages. For one, there’s a possibility that the implant will eventually need to be removed. This calls for another surgical procedure, introducing a new risk of complications and injury. Metal implants can also contribute to stress shielding,
where the implant bears load that the bone would normally manage. This can lead to bone loss. Instead, you could use resorbable polymer implants. These degrade as the tissue heals, so they don’t need to be taken out. While modern resorbable polymer fixation devices have seen development and use since the 1960s, the concept of resorbable medical materials, such as absorbable sutures, dates back much further. Efforts to create diverse resorbable implants have been ongoing for decades, with varying degrees of success. Yet from screws to stents to tissue regeneration, the potential of these implants is immense.
Custom-tuned polyesters, including PLA, PGA and PLGA copolymers, are being used to form scaffolds and temporary implants that match native tissue mechanics and degrade inside the body, eliminating the need for explant surgery. Monica Karpinski investigates
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www.medicaldevice-developments.com
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