Plastic Designed for Severe Bone Breaks

A plastic made of shrimp shells, one of the components in Elmer’s Glue and a biodegradable polymer used in medical applications may have the potential to become a scaffold for a broken or a missing bone—a placeholder structure that can be replaced with genuine bone as the body heals.

Creator of the plastic is Richard Oreffo, professor of Musculoskeletal Science at the University of Southampton, England. The polymer “has this lovely honeycomb structure that allows living cells to crawl all over it. Blood vessels can penetrate it. So it’s really nice, ” he said.

Oreffo’s team has tested the polymer using mice that had parts of their femur bones removed. The hole was of a size “that won’t heal normally, ” he said. “We can put these scaffolds into that [gap] and look at their repair over four to eight weeks.” When the scaffold was seeded with human bone stem cells, the bone healed faster, but even without the stem cells, the mice’s bones began to fill in along the scaffolding structure.

In humans, the structure should serve to repair bone breaks that are too severe to heal on their own. Given enough time, the new material should fully degrade inside a living body, leaving the repaired bone to stand alone, Oreffo said. The study was recently published online in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.