In the lab, engineer's novel liquid provides a solid fix for .

A bone-healing fluid that can be injected into breaks with a syringe shows such strong promise in lab testing, that it has been commissioned from Brown by a Massachusetts biotech startup for further development.By David OrensteinA nonmetalic solutionNanomaterials engineer Thomas Webster is developing alternativesto metals,which do not come naturally in the trunk and can have problems with surrounding tissue.

redit: Webster Lab/Brown University Here`s the vision: an elderly woman comes into the emergency room after a fall. She has upset her hip. The orthopaedic surgeon doesn`t come with metal plates or screws or shiny titanium ball joints. Instead, she pulls out a syringe filled with a new form of fluid that will solidify in seconds and injects into the break. Over time, new bone tissue will have its place, encouraged by natural growth factors embedded in the synthetic molecules of the material. Although still early in its development, the fluid is real. In the Brown engineering lab of professor Thomas Webster it`s called TBL, for the novel DNA-like "twin-base linker" molecules that make it seemingly ideal properties. The biotechnology company Audax Medical Inc. based in Littleton, Mass. has just announced an exclusive license of the technology from Brown. It brands the technology as Arxis and sees similar potential for repairing broken vertebrae. "The ground we`re excited about this stuff is because it gets us away from metals," Webster said. "Metals are not in us naturally and they can possess a lot of problems with surrounding tissues." In around of his work, Webster employs nanotechnology to try to bridge metals to bone better than traditional bone cement. But TBL is an all new material, co-developed with longtime colleague and chemist Hicham Fenniri at the University of Alberta. Fenniri synthesized the molecules, while Webster`s research has focussed on ensuring that TBL becomes viable material for medical use.Buttressing bonesTwin-based linker molecules, top left, self-assemble into six-molecule rings. Stacked in a pipe shape, the rings of molecules not just allow a new scaffold for bone growth, but can also store growth factors and helpful drugs inside. Credit: Webster Lab/Brown UniversityThe molecules are artificial, but made from elements that are no strangers to the body: carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. At room temperature their aggregate form is a liquid, but the material they form solidifies at body temperature. The molecules look like nanoscale tubes (billionths of a meter wide), and when they get together, it is in a spiraling ladder-shaped arrangement reminiscent of DNA or collagen. That natural structure makes it slowly to mix with bone tissue. In the place inside the nanotubes, the team, which includes graduate student Linlin Sun, has managed to thrust in various drugs including antibiotics, anti-inflammatory agents, and bone growth factors, which the tubes release over the line of months. Even better, different recipes of TBL, or Arxis, can be chemically tuned to get as heavy as ivory or as delicate as cartilage, and can solidify in seconds or minutes, as needed. Once it is injected, nothing else is needed. "We really wish the fact that it doesn`t want anything other than temperature to solidify," Webster said. Other compounds that people have developed require exposure to ultraviolet light and cannot thus be injected through a tiny syringe hole. They require larger openings to be created.Liquid provides a solid fix for broken bones from Brown PAUR on Vimeo. For all of TBL`s apparent benefits, they get just been demonstrated in cow bone fragments in incubators on the lab bench top, Webster said. TBL still needs to be proved in vivo and, ultimately, in human trials. Part of the arrangement with Audax will include back to keep the material`s clinical development. Audax research and development director Whitney Sharp, a Brown alumna (Sc.B. 2008; Sc.M. 2009), is now working with Webster`s group. "They see the future where hopefully we will get to the place where we won`t be implanting these huge pieces of metal into people," Webster said. "Instead we`ll be implanting things through a goad that could be exploited to mend a hip that`s more natural."