Schedules gone awry
The university’s bone center had themselves a nice little symposium the other day… strictly “local”, various doctors and faculty from the medical and dental schools coming together to present their work to each other. And one group of out-of-depth chemists. I have no idea how the talks went in the morning, except that all four speakers must have spoken very slowly… they wound up going an hour past the scheduled time for lunch. So, for the group of chemists who’d just come to present their posters to the doctors and dentists, there was a mystifying and annoying delay.
There was one group doing some very cool stuff with tissue scaffolding for bone repair. The basic idea is simple — bone cells prefer to grow on existing bone, or at least on cartilage (that’s how most bones form in the first place). But what happens when there’s just no bone at a spot for the new cells to grow on, for instance in major accidents? Well, give them an artificial place to rest while they grow. Of course, bone cells are picky, they won’t grow on just any surface… and one doesnt’ really want the artificial support material to stay in one’s leg forever and ever. So what’s needed is a material that feels “familiar” to the bone cells, and that will eventually dissolve away or be actively removed by the body (without immune response or other problems). It should also be easy to form into just the right shape that’s needed.
This particular group uses polylactic acid, which is conveniently “green” (made from corn), reasonably sturdy, cheap, and the body likes it just fine. (“Poly(L-lactic) acid! it does a broken bone good!”) They actually print it out (first as a wax negative, which molds the PLLA as it solidifies, then the wax is leached away), into just the shape needed, with lots and lots of holes for bone cells to grow into. The cells like it, the body doesn’t reject it, and it should melt away as desired for long-term recovery. It’s not quite “printing out bones”, but it’s getting close.
Of course, by the time the morning talks finally ended, it was (past) time for lunch… so pretty much everyone ran off either before or right after lunch, no posters for them. Pretty small response to the chemistry posters. (Oh well.)
Oh, and they left my abstract out of the “program”, too. *sniff*