Elastic, 'Squirtable' Surgical Glue Seals Wounds in 60 Seconds
Biomedical engineers from the University of Sydney have developed a potentially life-saving surgical glue called 'MeTro.' The highly elastic and adhesive surgical glue quickly seals wounds without the need for staples or sutures and could transform how surgeries are performed. MeTro's high elasticity makes it ideal for sealing wounds in body tissues that continually expand and relax - such as lungs, hearts and arteries - that are otherwise at risk of re-opening. The material also works on internal wounds that are often in hard-to-reach areas and have typically required staples or sutures due to surrounding body fluid hampering the effectiveness of other sealants. MeTro sets in just 60 seconds once treated with UV light.
Transcript
00:00:06 We live in amazing times. Biomedical advances we have nowadays are treating us in terms of a whole range of diseases, a whole range of conditions and that’s fantastic. But imagine an extreme scenario, let’s imagine a scenario where all of a sudden you or I unfortunately are caught in a major accident, a car accident. All of a sudden you start to bleed. A large section of you is damaged, there’s bleeding that’s occurring and blood vessels broken. Let’s imagine for example, even worse, your lung has now gotten damaged as well and you can’t even breathe properly.
00:00:37 Wouldn’t it be amazing to have a material that you could literally squirt onto that broken blood vessel and seal it up. Onto that lung, so you could squirt it onto there so you could start to breathe normally again. We’ve developed a material that can do just that. This material is based on a natural elastic protein, that natural elastic protein is methacrylated. Methacrylated tropolastin so we call it MeTro for short. Let’s look at the following example. When a human lung is punctured it collapses and requires surgery. MeTro will eliminate the need for stitching and stapling and will simplify the procedure.
00:01:19 It’s applied directly to the wound site and activated with light to form a complete seal. Our MeTro seals in seconds, it’s stronger than surrounding lung tissue and it retains the lung's natural elasticity. Unlike stitching or staples, MeTro promotes the healing of tissue, allows the site to recover and returns that tissue to normal function in just half the time. We have developed this technology in collaboration with colleagues at Harvard University and Northeastern University, both in the United States. Those colleagues Nasim Annabi and Ali Khademhosseini together with us here at the University of Sydney have really allowed us to have an extraordinary collaboration that has generated in this powerful material MeTro.
00:02:07 Now that we’ve got MeTro we’re poised to be able to do these treatments in humans. But there are so many things we can do with this material and we look forward to having the opportunity to test and apply these technologies for a whole range of applications in people.