Tiny Glue Guns to Patch Surgical Holes
You’re in the ER with appendicitis. Surgeons can remove your appendix through a few three-fourth-inch openings, but the bulky sutures and staples they use to close internal incisions are difficult and time-consuming to manipulate. One day it may be possible to patch you up faster and more easily using glue made of nanoparticles, which can be injected through a needle for use in minimally invasive surgeries and eye surgery.

“In our previous work we’ve been developing tissue-adhesive glues and patches,” says Jeff Karp of Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, who is the senior author on a paper describing the glue in Advanced Healthcare Materials. “The challenge moving forward is: how do you deliver these materials?”
In order to inject the glue through a whisker-thin needle without clogging it, the researchers developed a way to make it in the form of nanoparticles, which solidified and formed a seal when a second chemical was injected. The glue can be delivered more quickly and with a smaller instrument than those needed to place sutures or staples, and its elastic properties better match those of the tissue around it. “It’s similar to a rubber band that you can stretch over and over again, except this is fully degradable,” says Karp.
Karp says the nanoparticle delivery mechanism could be adapted to other glues that have been developed recently to use in surgeries, including a cardiac glue his lab developed earlier. Though promising, none of these other glues have yet solved the delivery problem for minimally invasive surgery.
So far, the researchers have tested the glue in a cow eye and a living mouse’s ear. They plan to continue testing in rabbits and rats, and if successful, they will move to clinical testing in humans. They are also interested in developing different triggers to make the glue cure—different chemicals, light, or heat—so that it can be deployed exactly when and where a surgeon wants.
Keep Reading
Most Popular

Meta has built a massive new language AI—and it’s giving it away for free
Facebook’s parent company is inviting researchers to pore over and pick apart the flaws in its version of GPT-3

The gene-edited pig heart given to a dying patient was infected with a pig virus
The first transplant of a genetically-modified pig heart into a human may have ended prematurely because of a well-known—and avoidable—risk.

Saudi Arabia plans to spend $1 billion a year discovering treatments to slow aging
The oil kingdom fears that its population is aging at an accelerated rate and hopes to test drugs to reverse the problem. First up might be the diabetes drug metformin.

Yann LeCun has a bold new vision for the future of AI
One of the godfathers of deep learning pulls together old ideas to sketch out a fresh path for AI, but raises as many questions as he answers.
Stay connected

Get the latest updates from
MIT Technology Review
Discover special offers, top stories, upcoming events, and more.