A new study has shown that a highly elastic and adhesive surgical sealant can effectively seal wounds in shape-shifting tissues without the need for common staples or sutures.
Glue
To repair ruptured or pierced organs and tissues, surgeons commonly use staples, sutures and wires to bring and hold the wound edges together so that they can heal. However, these procedures can be difficult to perform in hard-to-reach areas of the body and wounds are often not completely sealed immediately. They also come with the risk that tissues are further damaged and infected. A particular challenge is posed by wounds in fragile or elastic tissues that continuously expand or contract and relax, like the breathing lung, the beating heart and pulsing arteries.
To remedy some of these problems, Harvard’s Wyss Institute biomedical engineers have developed a range of surgical sealants that can bond tissues to stop leakages. Yet, "currently available sealants are not suitable for most surgical applications and they do not work alone without the need for suturing or stapling because they lack an optimal combination of elasticity, tissue adhesion and strength. Using our expertise in creating materials for regenerative medicine, we aimed to create an actual fix for this problem in a multi-disciplinary effort with clinicians and bioengineers," said Ali Khademhosseini, associate faculty member at Harvard's Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering.
The researchers demonstrated that a sealant, based on elastin — a human, resilience-imparting protein present in all elastic tissues such as the wall of arteries, skin, and lungs — can be photochemically tuned to effectively seal incisions in arteries and lungs of rats and to repair wounds in the lungs of pigs, all suture and staple-free.
The potential applications include treating serious internal wounds at emergency sites and in war zones, as well as improving hospital surgeries.