Biorubber ushers in a new era for tissue engineers
5 Jun 2002
Scientists from around the world have been contacting an MIT lab for samples of 'biorubber,' a new material with myriad applications including engineered lungs, heart valves and other elastic tissues.
Biodegradable polymers that are safe to use in the human body are already used in drug delivery and tissue engineering. Whether impregnated with medicine or serving as a scaffold for growing cells, such polymers are eventually absorbed by the body when their work is done.
Until now, however, none of these polymers has had the defining property of a rubber band - the ability to stretch then snap back to an original shape. The dominant material in today's market is hard and brittle.
'If you think about it, though, many of the organs in the body are elastic,' said Robert Langer, MIT's Germeshausen Professor of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering. For example, the tiny air sacs in lungs expand more than seven times when you inhale.
'So if researchers engineer replacements for these organs some day, they certainly want them to mimic the original tissues.'
Hence the query Langer received eight years ago from Dr. Joseph P. Vacanti, head of surgical transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital. Vacanti, who has collaborated with Langer for years, asked the MIT engineer if he could make an elastic polymer for use in tissue engineering.
Biorubber, announced in the June issue of the journal Nature Biotechnology, is the result. Langer's coauthors are Yadong Wang, a research associate in chemical engineering; Guillermo A. Ameer, a chemical engineering postdoctoral associate now at Northwestern University; and Barbara J. Sheppard, a comparative pathologist in the Division of Comparative Medicine now at the Wyeth Genetics Institute.
'Because of the physical characteristics of the material, it could act as scaffolding to help in the design of heart tissue, blood vessels, cartilage, bone and many other structures of the human body including whole organs for transplantation. We are now working with Drs. Wang and Langer in exploring its use in these areas of tissue engineering', Vacanti said.
In addition to being strong, biocompatible and inexpensive (because the researchers can make it in large quantities of some 400 grams per batch), biorubber also has a number of other advantages. For example, due to its general chemical composition it can be easily tailored to have a variety of different properties, such as a fast or slow degradation rate, for different applications. Biorubber's brittle counterparts are much more difficult to modify.
Although the new material has yet to be approved for use in humans by the Food and Drug Administration, a process that could take years, Wang is optimistic about its success. That's because its two principal building blocks are well-known to be non-toxic. One of these - glycerol - is common in all human cells, and the other received FDA approval in 1996 for use in another polymer developed by Langer for drug delivery.
Even before publication of the biorubber 'birth announcement' in Nature Biotechnology, several scientists learned of the new material from visits to Langer's lab. Wang has sent samples to researchers in the United States, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Japan and New Zealand. They in turn have been exploring biorubber's applications in engineering blood vessels, heart valves, liver and cartilage.
The work was sponsored by the US National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.
