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Closing Surgical Incisions With a Paintbrush and Nanoparticles
New submitter BiancaM (3582365) writes "A group of chemists has shown the
power of nanoparticles for closing and healing surgical wounds. Using no more than a paintbrush they are able to close surgical openings as well as classical techniques such as sutures. However in fragile deep tissues such as liver even more remarkable results were found- normally fatal damage to internal organs is repaired in seconds using a nanoparticle glue. The results show that closing after surgery can be faster and simpler using nanomaterials to glue wounds shut."
For something between the above linked abstract and the research paper, there's this write-up at PhysOrg, and a video of the technique in action.
Does the nano-particle solution happen to just be super-glue? This has been used for years for the type of thing the video shows (as I understand).
At least not as described by Drexler 30 years ago with the nanomachine assemblers going around doing programmed things atom by atom. I guess fine powders in water applied by surgeons slicing people open is a *step* in the right direction, but calling this "nano" anything is a huge letdown.
First paste [to fix your busted liver]!
Nothing posted to
Is it just me, or does that guy really suck at suturing? I'm not a physician (never even played one), but I've watched instructional videos, and that didn't look like how the pros do it. The pros can suture and tie a knot way faster. If you suture like that then obviously glue would be better!
I felt really bad for whatever mammal that was (dog? rabbit?), especially because of the suturing job. I guess it could be worse; some scientists spend 8 hours a day putting rats under a guillotine. But then they die quickly, and don't have to get sliced up repeatedly. I suppose the product will help minimize pain for research animals in the future, as well as human patients.
Good thing Scarface died in the end, otherwise he'd be pissed
Seven of Nine approves.
> Sutures are traumatic to soft connective tissues, such as liver or lungs. Polymer tissue adhesives require complex in vivo control of polymerization or cross-linking reactions and currently suffer from being toxic, weak, or inefficient within the wet conditions of the body. Herein, we demonstrate using Stöber silica or iron oxide nanoparticles that nanobridging, that is, adhesion by aqueous nanoparticle solutions, can be used in vivo in rats to achieve rapid and strong closure and healing of deep wounds in skin and liver. Nanoparticles were also used to fix polymer membranes to tissues even in the presence of blood flow, such as occurring after liver resection, yielding permanent hemostasis within a minute. Furthermore, medical devices and tissue engineering constructs were fixed to organs such as a beating heart. The simplicity, rapidity, and robustness of nanobridging bode well for clinical applications, surgery, and regenerative medicine.
So, the very important questions of "what is the glue" and "did they try gluing objects to tissue" were actually answered in the abstract. Next time, don't bother writing a Slashdot header, please, just include the article's header, which was much better written and included the important data.
But what a fascinating approach: I wonder how the approach would serve for bone re-assembly, which has been done sine before WW with platinum, titanium, or surgical steel screws and pins? Or how well it might work with wounds or piercings in the mouth?
Or is that just the example given to make us think it's for surgery? It's probably going to be mostly used to make industrial food even cheaper.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
Bon appetit!
I AM a physician, and yes, whoever does the demonstration takes quite a bit away from the demonstration by being pretty horrific at suturing... like 2nd year medical student who hasn't practiced bad. If they are going to compare quality of tissue approximation between sutures and their glue, they should probably use proper technique. A plastic surgeon would have laid out 10 sutures or more into the same space, probably in half the time. I am sure there's a senior surgery resident out there who wouldn't mind getting a few hundred bucks to tie a few sutures on camera.
That being said, there are some structures in the body that are very fragile, and difficult to sew. Also, the elderly and the chronically ill have tissues that just fall apart, limiting the usefulness of many surgeries in managing their illness. If we could create seams that don't rely as much on tissue strength, we could probably operate on quite a few more people.
Same stupid off topic troll post, over and over again.
All I know is that some black guy named Ben invented rice and that he was someone's uncle.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Really? As if all nano-scale particles have some kind of magical properties? (On top of those relating to branding and getting hits on your press-release?)
From TFA:
That's not nanotech, that's fucking chemistry.
I doubt that should even count as your basic type-IV nanomaterials or type-V biopolymer nanotech. There's nothing "nano" to see here except for the 18th-century tech known as "molecules", and it's certainly not worthy of 61 separate uses of "nano-" words in the paper.
No wonder any discussion around "real" nanotechnology (i.e. atomically precise manufacturing - the technology the word was invented to describe) is so damn confusing.
Why doesn't the gene pool have a life guard?