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Monday, December 21, 2009

Surgical Suture Made of... Stem Cells?

Surgical Suture Made of... Stem Cells?
College Students Create Surgical Suture with Healing Potential

Lew Schon, MD
Union Memorial Hospital

Special from Bottom Line's Daily Health News
December 21, 2009

T his gets my vote for best college project of the year. Last July a team of 10 Johns Hopkins undergraduate students won a competition held by the university’s department of biomedical engineering by assembling and testing a device that makes it possible to embed a patient’s own stem cells in surgical thread. Use of stem cells facilitates healing and speeds recovery in parts of the body with poor blood supply -- and in this case, the sutures serve as a scaffold on which new tendon cells can grow.

Lew Schon, MD, a Baltimore-based foot and ankle surgeon who is a long-time adviser to the Johns Hopkins Biomedical Engineering program, gets credit for the idea, which he suggested might be an exciting project for students to work on. The students located a machine that could weave thread in a way that enhanced survival of the stem cells, then tested it to see how it worked. They used a stem-cell-embedding concept created by Rich Spedden of Bioactive Surgical, Inc. (a Baltimore-based medical-technology company that sponsored the team) as the foundation for their prototype. The early results using the students’ thread were positive enough that human trials may occur within a few years.

And why is this a big deal? Though early tests only involve the use of the thread in tendon surgery, where a quick and thorough recovery can help reduce the risk of reinjury or lasting impairment, the suture could potentially be used for just about any surgical procedure. If it works as well as some suspect, its advantages may be wide-ranging indeed -- less scarring, faster and stronger healing. I’ll be keeping an eye on this to see where it ends up -- and to see if further congratulations are in order for these creative students.


Lew Schon, MD, Greater Chesapeake Orthopaedic Associates at Union Memorial Hospital, Baltimore.


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