Global Challenges/Chemistry Solutions
Promoting Public Health: Sandcastle worm’s secrets could yield new medical adhesive
October 26, 2009
Watch a narrated video of the sandcastle worm |
SummaryScientists have copied the natural glue secreted by a |
You probably know people who have broken bones and had screws or pins inserted in their bodies to repair the fractures. These treatments have been used for years to help bones heal. But they are far from perfect in repairing certain kinds of fractures.
For more precise reconstruction of compound fractures and shattered bones, a team of bioengineers have looked to Mother Nature for an alternative to metal hardware. Russell Stewart and colleagues of the University of Utah have duplicated a natural glue secreted by a tiny sea creature called the sandcastle worm. The hope is to fix small bones broken in battlefield injuries, car crashes and other accidents.
Here is Dr. Stewart explaining how the sandcastle worm uses the glue to construct its underwater home:
“In the wild they glue together sand grains, sea shells and whatever sort of mineral
particles they can get a hold of. They use these tentacles to gather those particles,
and they bring them in towards their mouth. If they like the size and the texture and
the shape, they’ll put a couple of little tiny dabs of glue on it and press it on to the
end of the tube… Our interest is in studying that natural adhesive and understanding
what it’s made out of, how it works and then copying that with synthetic polymers
that we hope to use as medical adhesives.”
Russell Stewart, Ph.D.
Image courtesy of
Fred Hayes
An adhesive for use in the body is not your ordinary substance. In order to be effective, it must bond to wet objects. And it cannot dissolve in water — instead it must displace it. The glue must also solidify in a timely fashion — otherwise it’s useless. The success of Dr. Stewart’s new glue hinges on how well it can mimic these properties of the sandcastle worm’s. Here again is Dr. Stewart:
“It’s a very challenging problem to glue things together in the wet environment,
like in open surgery, and the same problems that a surgeon has that would want
to glue bones together in open surgery is very similar to the problems that this
sandcastle worm faces when it’s gluing sandcastles together underwater.”
Still the adhesive has passed initial toxicity studies in cell cultures, and its strength exceeds that of Super Glue. For a more colorful description of the glue’s grabbing power, here’s Dr. Stewart again:
“On a 1 square centimeter bond we can hang a 40-pound bag of potatoes…
It might already be adequate for repairing bones that are in non-loadbearing
situations, particularly the cranial facial bones.”
Although Dr. Stewart has reached certain objectives with his adhesive, he sees additional challenges on the horizon.
“I think the biggest problems are still ahead of us in being able to use this in medicine
because of biocompatibility issues, and we want it to degrade, and we need to tune
the degradation rates. We’d like for them to be the same roughly as the natural
healing process. I think those are going to be bigger problems than we’ve faced so far.”
Smart Chemists/Innovative Thinking
Smart chemists. Innovative thinking. That’s the key to solving global challenges of the 21st Century. Be sure to check our other podcasts on promoting public health [Promoting Public Health and Redefining DNA: Darwin from the atom up]. Today’s podcast was written by John Simpson. I’m Adam Dylewski at the American Chemical Society in Washington.