Healing Wounds With Diamonds

A team at Northwestern University, led by Dean Ho, has discovered that nanodiamonds are a wound's best friend. Insulin is very attracted to nanodiamonds and in addition to regulating blood sugar, insulin can accelerate the healing process and stave off infection in wound sites. Since the tiny diamond can be easily placed in a wound without causing further damage, this is an excellent way to get an increased amount of insulin there as well. From the article, "A substantial amount of insulin can be loaded onto the nanodiamonds, which have a high surface area. The nanodiamond-insulin clusters, by releasing insulin in alkaline wound areas, could accelerate the healing process and decrease the incidence of infection. Ho says this ability to release therapeutics from the nanodiamonds on demand represents an exciting strategy towards enhancing the specificity of wound treatment."

Re:insulin

[Anonymous Coward]

While it is true that bodybuilders do this - it is also true that it doesn't work.

In a non-diabetic person your body is capable of producing massive amounts of insulin on demand to cover sugar or other carbohydrates. If you want a rush of Insulin then eat a lot of sugar, if your body doesn't cover it keeping your blood-sugar under normal levels, then by definition you are diabetic. If you're a type 1 diabetic like me you already know why you wouldn't want to take Insulin unless you absolutely have to...

Re:insulin

[yabos]

They don't use it to lower body fat. Insulin does one simple thing which is open your cells, both fat and muscle, to glucose. It does this by binding to the cell at the insulin receptor, which causes the cell's internal GLUT-4 protein to come from deep in the cell up to the surface. GLUT-4 opens the gateway for glucose to the cell which will often pull in other things(nutrients, water) along with it. Injecting insulin is not a good thing long term unless you are diabetic. Some body builders end up insulin resistant or diabetic by abusing it. Now the reason that they actually do it is because it's extremely good at what it does which is draw energy into your cells. Insulin is what we call an anabolic hormone and if combined with huge amounts of carbs(usually while on anabolic androgenic steroids as well), your muscles get a lot of glucose which gives you lots of energy, but also enhances growth and recovery if you are training the muscle.

Re:How expensive could this treatment be?

[Jeng]

There is a natural supply of nano-diamonds, and I can't imagine nano-diamonds being all that expensive to create.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presolar_grains [wikipedia.org]

The chemical vapor deposition method of producing synthetic diamonds should be able to create nano-diamonds pretty easy I would think.

Re:Good luck

[GiMP]

HMO is "health maintenance organization". Remember, we do not have national medicine in the USA, we instead have medical insurance companies. There are two primary types of plans one can get, an HMO or a PPO (Preferred Provider Organization), the difference is in which doctors you can see, how much you pay, and the process through which you must visit specialists.

Re:Why?

[cfa22]

The insulin molecule has two patches on its surface that are predominantly hydrophobic (water-hating) that likely help it to stick to the pure-carbon surface of (nano)diamond. The "nano" bit just insures there is a large amount of surface area for insulin to stick to per unit mass of diamond. The investigators only showed that their nanodiamonds can suck up a lot of insulin; they are far from proving their insulin-loaded nanodiamonds are useful for wound-healing. The investigators only speculate that insulin would act as a growth hormone (generally thought to be its minor function; the major function being the transsystem signal for organism-wide glucose homeostasis). They point out the pH in a typical wound could approach 10.5, which would facilitate insulin release from nanodiamonds. (Such increases in alkalinity in beta cells, the pacreatic cells that produce insulin, are thought to trigger its release.) Unfortunately, it might also compromise insulin's ability to dock with its receptor, a necessary requirement for its function (either as a growth hormone or in glucose regulation). Directly injecting insulin into wounds speeds healing (sometimes by 50%) (Zhang et al, J. Surg. Res. 142:90 (2007) link [doi.org]), so it seems like the investigators have a plausible path to follow.

Re:How expensive could this treatment be?

[smellsofbikes]

You take an oxy-acetylene torch, adjust it to a fuel-rich flame, and point it at a big piece of metal, then scrape off the stuff deposited on the metal and separate out the diamonds from the buckminsterfullerine from the soot. Here's a journal article [springerlink.com] and here's one of the many patents [patentstorm.us].