Professor Guillermo Ameer has used citric acid as the building block of a rubbery materialthat can beused to make replacement blood vessels and patch up damaged bone. This Tuesday, at the American Chemical Society meeting in Chicago, he explained to a packed room of scientists how the polymer is made.
He combines citric acid with another non-toxic chemical, 1,8-octanediol. The result is a stretchy and strong yellow rubber that can be molded into a wide variety of shapes and used to replace damaged body parts.
Currently, slippery plastic PTFE tubes are used to replacedamaged blood vessels, but many of them clog within the first year and nearly allof them are useless within four years. The unique polymer developed byProfessor Ameer causes almost no irritation when it is inserted into the body,
so it should last a lot longer than traditional implants. The ability of thepolymer to sit in the body without causing an adverse reaction is the crucialto its success as a material for tissue engineering.
In addition to replacing blood vessels, the polymercan also be blended with hydroxyapatite powder, the same material that makes upnatural bone, to make a very hard material that can be used to repair brokenbones. The hard composite has been tested in animals, and it allows naturalbone to grow into and over it, making the damaged bone as good as new.
