Blogs / Discoblog

Despite all the amazing advances in recent medicine, there are still plenty of simple problems lacking a clear solution. For one, we still haven’t found a great way to heal fractures in the top of joint bones—any mistake in alignment when the bone is being repaired, and you wind up with a useless joint—not to mention terrible arthritis.

Enter a team of bioengineers at the University of Utah, who had an ingenious idea: If sandcastle worms can produce natural glue strong enough to hold together a tiny sand-home against the intertidal surf, why not copy that glue and use it on broken knees?

Now, the first generation prototype of the so-called worm glue has been tested on cow bone pieces (from groceries, meaning the cows were already deceased) and has performed 37 percent as well as commercial superglue. The results will be published online in next week’s edition of Macromolecular Biosciences. Lead author Russell Stewart projects that they’ll be testing the glue on live animals within a year or two, and on humans within the next five to 10 years. While the glue won’t be able to fix your broken femur, it could be very useful for small bone fragments in fractured knees, wrists, elbows, and ankles, as well as the face and skull.

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Got a printer? Then you may someday be able to print out a new heart.

By packing a printer full of cells instead of ink, Japanese scientist Makoto Nakamura wants to construct a human heart. But don’t skip a beat just yet: Nakamura needs another 20 years to make what sounds like a science fiction dream into a reality.

The secret, he thinks, is bioprinting, a process that is used to create 3-D structures in the same way a printer uses ink to create words and images on a page. The process works like this: First the cells clump together and flow like liquid, then a printer drops the cells down onto a surface, layering the cells on top of each other until the desired object is created.

So far Nakamura has used this technique to create a tube that resembles a blood vessel, but he hasn’t gotten near anything resembling an entire beating heart.

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Larva therapy, a method used to clean out wounds for centuries, is making a comeback in modern medicine. In the latest development, researchers claim they have purified an antibiotic from maggot secretions that kills many strains of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), as well as other bacteria. This new maggot juice may someday give patients all the benefits of the larva’s antibacterial properties, without the ick-factor of using actual larvae on a wound.

When some species of fly larvae are applied directly to wounds, they munch away on dead tissue, leaving healthy tissue intact. But keeping the maggots in a pouch on top of the infection seems to work, too, because the larvae secrete microbe-killing enzymes through the cloth.

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