New surgical glue that works well in wet environment on the horizon.

Staples and surgical sutures will soon be a thing of past. Researchers at Purdue University have developed a nontoxic, biocompatible glue from adhesive proteins produced by mussels and other creatures.

The paper was published in April in Journal Biomaterials.

The material is unique because it is able to work while immersed in a water environment, and have shown to be far better than other current commercially available products.

The material is currently named ELY16, is constructed from an elastin-like polypeptide (ELP) that can be produced in high quantity from Escherichia coli and can coacervate in response to environmental factors such as temperature, pH, and salinity.  

ELY16 is rich in tyrosine and after reaction with tyrosine kinase it is changed into mELY16, converting the tyrosine residue into 3,4-dihydroxyphenylalanine (DOPA).

Both these compounds (ELY16 and mELY16) are cytocompatible and exhibit significant dry strength. Addition of DOPA makes them adherent in humid environment.

Julie Liu, an associate professor of chemical engineering and biomedical engineering at Purdue University said, “Sutures and staples have several disadvantages relative to adhesives, including patient discomfort, higher risk of infection and the inherent damage to surrounding healthy tissue.”

It is estimated that 230 million major surgeries are performed worldwide every year and 12 million trauma patients are treated in USA each year. About 60% of these wounds are closed by surgical suture or staples.

“Current biomedical adhesive technologies do not meet these needs,” she said. “We designed a bioinspired protein system that shows promise to achieve biocompatible underwater adhesion coupled with environmentally responsive behavior that is ‘smart,’ meaning it can be tuned to suit a specific application.”

The initial tests were done aluminum substrates, but the researchers will soon start testing with soft body tissue like substrates to make it suitable for biomedical purposes.

“To our knowledge, mELY16 provides the strongest bonds of any engineered protein when used completely underwater, and its high yields make it more viable for commercial application compared to natural adhesive proteins,” she said. “So it shows great potential to be a new smart underwater adhesive.”

Here is the YouTube video ‘Non-toxic underwater adhesive could bring new surgical glue’

  

Source: Purdue University News letter.