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Dissolvable Glass For Bone Repair
gpronger writes "Sticks and Stones May Break My Bones, but Glass Will Certainly Mend Them! The old schoolyard ditty may be changed to reflect developments using metallic glass that will dissolve in situ instead of the traditional stainless steel or titanium hardware, which require removal by surgery once the bone has healed. Physics World reports that researcher Jörg Löffler at ETH Zurich has created an alloy of 60% magnesium, 35% zinc, and 5% calcium, molded in the form of metallic glass. Through rapid cooling, the alloy forms a molecularly amorphous glass that slowly dissolves over time, supporting the injury long enough for healing, then slowly dissolving away."
I doubt the little schoolyard ditty will be changed.
No, really.
Will this mean an end to casts? If this could be put in place and support the bone from the inside while you heal, why would we need external casts? Especially if it's injectable in some way.
I put on my robe and wizard hat..
They call him Mr.Glass
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
My group is cooperating with a startup that makes, among other things, glass microbeads covered with nanoparticles of whose composition I am not allowed to speak. These nanoparticles cause bone cell growth. In fact, they cause stem cell differentiation into osteoblasts, which I think is beyong cool. The glass slowly dissolves in the body and the bone remains. Our hypothesis (backed by some experimental data) is that these beads will restore fractured bones, such as spinal vertebrae, to patients with extreme osteoporosis.
Rarely have I wished success to a company, as in this case. Perhaps seeing my aunt succumb to multiple spinal fractures scared the shit out of me.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Unlike in a certain X-men movie, this "metallic glass" is NOT going to be injected into living human bodies while molten. It'll be carefully forged in a factory into parts that are currently made out of steel or titanium : various plates, screws, and other orthopedic hardware. For injuries that require surgery, orthopedic surgeons would use these metallic glass parts instead of what they currently use.
The problem is obvious : it's doubtful that this alloy will be as strong as steel or titanium, and so the screws or plates would have to be thicker and heavier to have the same strength. There's an obvious tradeoff : do you make a bigger incision and drill out bigger holes in the bone to use this dissolvable metallic glass, or do you use conventional hardware? Also, undoubtedly there will be decades of debate over whether the trace minerals leached into the body cause harm or not.
Bottom line : even if this technology turns out to be safe and effective and is approved for use, it will probably be decades until it is used most of the time.
This sounds like a solid business plan: repair broken bones and weaken others so that they will break soon too, thus ensuring a returning customer!
The FDA and other national regulators of medicine are supposed to protect the people from such business models.
Imagine the Hollywood scripts that could come from this new material. Rather than having adamantium grafted to his skeleton, Wolverine could have had glass grafted instead. Then, rather than being a badass unstoppable killing machine, he could gimp around on a cane fantasizing himself to be a super villain before Bruce Willis discovers himself to be an unlikely super hero with absolutely no backstory who cannot be broken! We can call the movie "A Tale of Two Unbreakables" and make billiions!. Profit!
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...I don't think it means what you think it means.
certain areas of the world are naturally deficient in certain necessary elements, like iodine. other areas are naturally high in certain dangerous elements, like arsenic. it doesn't matter how much good nutrition they get from the foodstuffs of their countryside, it doesn't even matter how rich they are. if the surrounding countryside doesn't have the element (or too much of it), it doesn't have the element (or too much of it). you need a technological response to the problem, regardless of socioeconomics or intent to eat a well-balanced diet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodine_deficiency#Local_impact
"Iodine deficiency has largely been confined to the developing world for several generations, but reductions in salt consumption and changes in dairy processing practices eliminating the use of iodine-based disinfectants have led to increasing prevalence of the condition in Australia and New Zealand in recent years. A proposal to mandate the use of iodized salt in most commercial breadmaking is expected to be adopted in 2009."
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_situ
In biology, in situ means to examine the phenomenon exactly in place where it occurs (i.e. without moving it to some special medium). This usually means something intermediate between in vivo and in vitro. For example, examining a cell within a whole organ intact and under perfusion may be in situ investigation. This would not be in vivo as the donor is sacrificed before experimentation, but it would not be the same as working with the cell alone (a common scenario in in vitro experiments).
That is, the use of the phrase in situ implies that the person is dead. in situ literally means "as it is," and is more synonymous with untampered. In a literal sense, the bone could heal by itself in situ, but with an implant, tampering has already occurred, and the process is actually occurring in vivo, in a live organism. It's a minor quibble, but don't use Latin when you can just say "in place," "without further intervention," or "on its own." These would have been better choices, and clearer because they are plain English.
--
Toro
Spot the English major in this post. :^)
Dissolvable is the proper spelling. I can be a moderator nao?
First, it's not clear to me that "fluid" and "liquid" have different meanings.
Second, glass is actually a solid. Flowing glass is a persistent, but untrue, urban myth.
i'm just brainstorming potential other uses for this dissolving glass. i don't understand the basis for your opposition to the idea on nothing other than "food should be nutritious" when clearly in some areas of the world, food alone simply can't deliver proper nutrition and technology is required to give people proper nutrition
its just an idea. there's a million reasons why subdural implants of time release minerals could be unworkable. but your particular reason about medical personnel doesn't fly: poor rural people get vaccinated by travelling medical groups all the time. if they aren't eating artificially dosed foods like their city brethren, a subdural slowly dissolving mineral boost that lasts a year could dramatically improve lives for very little cost
you really think the idea should be discarded out of hand because you believe (erroneously) that food alone is the solution?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I engineer orthopaedic implants, and one of the things that is very interesting when considering design and excecution of implants is the culture of the physicians who will be using them.
Physicians who train in different countries (or time periods for that matter) have various preferences on what approaches they use and how they utilize certain devices. What is interesting about this case is that European surgeons are more likely to take hardware OUT of the patient after the fracture is resolved.
This is in contrast to US surgeons who tend to leave everything IN, supposedly to minimise the risk of second surgical exposure. Which technique is correct is up for debate, due to issues like infection rates and stress shielding, but this technology allows the best of both worlds.
This would not replace casting, for reasons mentioned above, but also because casting alone is only used on non-displaced fractures (or displace fractures that can be easily be aligned again).
Of even more interest is the mechanical characteristics of this material. Fracture plates that have moduli closer to bone don't produce as much stress sheilding, which causes the load path to run primarily through the plate and not the bone. Though this sounds like a good idea, bone relies on strain (which it sees due to stress applied and young's modulus) to signal bone remodeling. Too much shunting of load and the bone atriphies, making it likely to break again. These "absorbable" technologies usually produce a more compliant device, which is good for this. However, there is also the issue of the device breaking down and loosing rigidity before the bone can fully support load.
This idea has been done before, it will be interesting to see how this one pans out.
-The more you learn, the more things you realize you don't know-