NEW YORK Results published today in FASEB (the journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology) by researchers at Columbia University, including Jeremy Mao of the Columbia College of Dental Medicine, demonstrate a novel way of using porous structures as a drug-delivery vehicle that can help boost the integration of host tissue with surgically implanted titanium.
Instead of being acted upon by the body as an impenetrable foreign object, the synthetic bone replacement currently being tested in rabbits features a porous material that allows for the delivery of microencapsulated bioactive cues that speed up the growth of host tissue at the site and allow for the growth of new bone.
A critical finding is that the drug dose needed for host tissue integration by this controlled-release approach is about 1/10 of that by the traditional technique of simple adsorption of the growth factor.
The approach could bring to orthopedics and dentistry a treatment that has wrought much interest and success in the field of cardiology with the development of drug-eluting stents, which take what is ordinarily an inert tube, and infuse it with drugs to make the placement of what is essentially a man-made, foreign object more compatible with the patients body, and at the same time, actively promoting healing of injured tissue.
After just four weeks, the porous implants that Mao and his team are using showed a 96 percent increase in bone-to-implant contact and a 50 percent increase in the growth of new bone over placebos.
How were such results achieved?
Since stem cells play a vital role in the growth of new bone, Mao and his team have focused on impregnating the titanium implants with a factor that homes the bodies own regenerating cells to the potential growth site to create and build on a platform for new bone.
The new approach may in the future obviate the need to harvest bone from a non-i
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| Contact: Alex Lyda mal2133@columbia.edu 212-305-0820 Columbia University Medical Center Source:Eurekalert |