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US researchers have developed a glass implant to repair broken legs and arms that can for the first time sufficiently bear the weight of patients while promoting repairing bone.
The implant, which is in the form of porous scaffolds made from silicate 13-93 “bioactive” glass, reacts when it is integrated with living tissue and converts to a bone-like material.
Dr Mohamed N. Rahaman, lead researcher from Missouri University of Science and Technology, said: “Right now, there is no synthetic material that is practical for structural bone repair. You can have the strongest material in the world, but it must also encourage bone growth in a reasonable amount of time.”
The research revealed that the bioactive glass implants bonded quickly and promoted a significant amount of bone growth within six weeks.
Conventional structural bone repair uses either a porous metal, which does not reliably repair bone, or a graft from a cadaver. A reasonable amount of time to regenerate a bone from an injury is considered to be three to six months.
The implants were implanted into the skulls of rats to examine how well they would integrate with the surrounding bone.
The scaffolds are manufactured in a laboratory through a process known as robocasting. This is a computer controlled technique to manufacture materials from ceramic slurries, layer by layer, to ensure uniform structure for porous material. The material was found to be as strong as cortical bone, the outer bones of the body such as the arms and legs, in early studies.
Rahaman said the next step for the research was to experiment with modified glass scaffolds to see how well they enhance certain attributes within the bone. For example doping the glass with copper should promote the growth of capillaries and blood vessels, while doping with silver would give it antibacterial properties.