Surgery has been suture-based for centuries, and although it has advanced beyond bone needles and silk thread, the process still harms the human body.
"Sutures are time-consuming, damage tissue and are technically challenging," says Maria Pereira, head of research at Paris-based Gecko Biomedical, whose bio-inspired alternative it says can replace stitches. Its adhesive is viscous, hydrophobic, biodegradable and cured by LED light. Unlike other glues, which can be washed away by water, it can be placed in wet environments such as the heart, where it works as both a sealant and a scaffold for tissue to grow over.
Pereira, 30, invented the glue in 2010 while a bioengineering PhD student in the MIT Portugal Program. Doctors at Boston Children's Hospital had approached her supervisor, Jeff Karp of the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, with a problem: how to close defects in a newborn baby's heart without sutures.
A newborn's heart is as large as its fist, so operations are extremely delicate. Pereira looked to nature for inspiration. "Understanding the basic principles of how things work is very important in developing new technologies," she says. Her sealant can stay sticky inside a beating pig's heart by mimicking the viscous, hydrophobic secretions of snails and sandcastle worms.
Karp and a group of prominent scientists and entrepreneurs founded Gecko Biomedical in 2012, hiring Pereira as head of research. Its first product made from the adhesive, GB02, acts as an adjunct to sutures in vascular reconstruction surgery and will go into clinical trials this spring, with the aim of securing regulatory approval in the first half of 2017.
The company, which has received more than €9 million (£7 million) in funding, is also working on GB04, which could end the need for sutures altogether. "The goal is to make surgery simpler and to change how it is done."
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
