Building Artificial Bone

Late-Eight writes "Researchers from the National University of Singapore, have recently developed a new way to make artificial bone from mineralised collagen. For some time scientists have tried to make nanosized artificial bone materials using various methods, And have recently turned their attention to mineralised collagen, a nanoapatite/collagen composite. This material is highly biocompatible and has the nanostructure of artificial bone. It could be used in bone grafts and bone-tissue engineering, among other applications."

Re:old news?

[RuBLed]

Yeah but they're trying to make a cash cow from it by restricting it as a temporary solution. Kudos to the Singaporean folks.

Personal interest in this.

[syousef]

I'm looking at having a mid-foot fusion sometime in the next year. Nasty operation. 3 months off my feet (and off work), only to be repeated a second time if it fails. Any weight on the joint in the first 6 weeks ruins the operation completely. Non-union's a 10-15% risk anyway, and there's also the risk of instability in the joint. I don't want to do it, but I'm told if I leave it too long I won't be able to walk and that in the medium term I have no other options. Once fused the bones can't be un-fused with current medical techniques. One of the bones I'm having fused looks like swiss cheese in the MRI and CAT scans. I'm worried that even if the fusion is a success it'll crumble in the long term. From a technical point of view the whole op seems like a really bad idea - it's just all they have to offer. Ever since I found out I've thought the best way would be to replace bad/worn out bone. I wonder if I've just been born a little early for proper bone replacement to be an option.

Unlike hip and knee replacements ankle surgery (especially replacements - thankfully not what I'm dealing with) don't have a high success rate. I wonder if this'll do anything to improve that.

Re:Personal interest in this.

[Orleron]

Don't hold your breath for this technology in your case, but there are a LOT of things you can do to tweak your odds. Don't smoke. Don't drink. Don't take any kind of corticosteroids. Don't take Vioxx or Celebrex for the pain because they inhibit bone healing. If you are overweight, lose weight so when you can weight-bare again you'll have less of a chance of refracturing. Get a Pulsed electromagnetic field (PEMF) unit, otherwise known as the EBI Bone Healing System. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1KuC3sJ6uU [youtube.com]

We've got a long way to go for bone replacements

[commando_jim]

Unfortunately I think a proper bone replacement is still a long ways off. In addition to figuring out an ideal material, we still have to figure out how to make the tendons and ligaments attach normally to the fake bone.

We also don't have a good idea of how to get rapid cellular invasion of very large bone grafts. Living bone is actually full of cells that tear down and rebuild the hard bits. This keeps our bones from wearing out the way a piece of metal will, due to wear and cracks in the microstructure. Unfortunately the cells in bone don't move that fast (0.23mm/day or so in perfect lab conditions with no bone in the way), and if you replace a whole load bearing bone at once you can have problems with the cells refusing to migrate into the center of the new bone material. This is, in part, why they'll try to use as much of the load bearing bone that's still there when they go to fuse a joint, instead of just cutting everything out and packing in a hydroxyapatite implant.

The last barrier to a real bone replacement is getting the replacement bone in the right shape. It's actually pretty difficult to build something up to be the same shape as a bone before you take the bone out of a person. And that's assuming that you have a "good" bone as a reference. (In your case they'd need to make sure the new bone wasn't full of holes, and quite probably adjust the shape to promote a more normal joint posture)

I work in a biomechanics lab, for the orthopedics at a major hospital (we mostly work with spine biomechanics) and believe me the surgeons would like nothing better than to be able to just pop out a bad bone and replace it. I just think we're a lot further from making that happen than papers like this make it sound. When somebody does figure it out I'm betting it happens for long bones like radius, ulna, humerus, tibia etc first, since perfect geometry isn't a big issue and the tendon/ligament insertions are pretty spaced out.

I guess that's my long-winded way of saying that a better solution to your ankle problem probably isn't going to develop out of this any time in the next decade or two. Which is too bad because all the work I've done with ankles tells me that the solutions we have could use a lot of improving.

As someone with two artifical hip joints

[theolein]

If somehow, it would be possible to give me regrown bone hips instead of these metal ones, I would be a very happy man.