Transcript: Polymer bone glue

Transcript of Audio

Polymer bone glue

Plastics are everywhere. Now, most plastic products are pretty obvious – things like CDs, pens, shopping bags, your TV remote control, even the casing around your TV.

But not all plastics are so obvious. Did you know that most glues are actually plastic? Take quick-drying glue. It contains cyanoacrylate, which is actually a plastic. It’s also very … quick drying.

Now scientists are hoping that they can use these sticky properties of plastics to glue together more than just … my hands.

Have you ever broken a bone? Many of us have. Those mighty plaster casts are worn like a badge of honour. But the reality is, heavy plaster casts are a pain in the, well, arm or the leg.

I’m a senior CSIRO scientist, Dr Roshan Mayadunne, and this is Dr Raju Adhikari, and we have coordinated something that is set to change all that.

It’s a type of plastic that actually glues broken bones together. This special glue can be injected into the break site and replaces the need for surgery to save the bone, and a cast to immobilise it.

We’re not ready to try it on humans yet, so we are doing our tests on cow bones which I got from the local butcher.

Fresh from the butcher’s shop. One of my lab techs kindly boiled the bone for 24 hours, cooled it down and thoroughly dried it out. So there’s nothing gross for me to handle, and I’ve got the perfect specimen for my bone glue experiment.

Bone glue is ‘cured’, which means hardened, in a couple of different ways.

The first one works by mixing two substances together. Only then does the glue harden. Depending on the chemical balance, this can take one minute to two days. This one has just been mixed and we’ve got about 10 minutes before it hardens. So we will quickly inject it into a hole in the cow bone, and wait and test.

Once in place and hard, this glue holds the bone together and supports it while it heals – no cast needed.

The other option that we have developed is a glue that cures on demand. It is injected into the bone and exposed to the blue light. This specialised light triggers a cascade of radicals – that is, electrons – and within 20 seconds the glue is cured.

Either way, the bone glue is totally safe to be used in the human body. It is biocompatible, which means that the human body won’t reject it. And it is biodegradable, which means that when the bone heals, the glue slowly breaks down.

The glue promotes bone tissue growth by providing a matrix for the new bone tissue to grow through.

There’s loads of other applications for the product, but I can’t reveal the details of them yet. The secret developments are hidden in the CSIRO laboratories. All I can say is: Watch this space!