Strong adhesive for wound healing
Researchers have been inspired by the mucus of a slug when developing a bio-adhesive. In contrast to conventional medical adhesives the novel adhesive has numerous advantages.
Anyone who has ever tried to put on a band-aid when their skin is damp knows that it can be frustrating. Wet skin isn't the only challenge for medical adhesives – the human body is full of blood, serum, and other fluids that complicate the repair of numerous internal injuries. Many of the adhesive products used today are toxic to cells, inflexible when they dry, and do not bind strongly to biological tissue. The research is reported in this week's issue of Science.
Unique combination of two features
A team of researchers from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard University has created a super-strong “tough adhesive” that is biocompatible and binds to tissues with a strength comparable to the body's own resilient cartilage, even when they're wet. “The key feature of our material is the combination of a very strong adhesive force and the ability to transfer and dissipate stress, which have historically not been integrated into a single adhesive,” says Dave Mooney, Professor of Bioengineering at SEAS.
Mucus should repel predators
When the researchers started thinking about how to improve medical adhesives, they found a solution in an unlikely place: a slug. The Dusky Arion (Arion subfuscus), common in Europe and parts of the United States, secretes a special kind of mucus when threatened that glues it in place, making it difficult for a predator to pry it off its surface. This glue was previously determined to be composed of a tough matrix peppered with positively charged proteins, which inspired the scientists to create a double-layered hydrogel consisting of an alginate-polyacrylamide matrix supporting an adhesive layer that has positively-charged polymers protruding from its surface.
High level of strength and toughness
The polymers bond to biological tissues via three mechanisms – electrostatic attraction to negatively charged cell surfaces, covalent bonds between neighboring atoms, and physical interpenetration – making the adhesive extremely strong. The team's design for the matrix layer includes calcium ions that are bound to the alginate hydrogel via ionic bonds. When stress is applied to the adhesive, those “sacrificial” ionic bonds break first, allowing the matrix to absorb a large amount of energy before its structure becomes compromised. In experimental tests, more than three times the energy was needed to disrupt the tough adhesive's bonding compared with other medical-grade adhesives and, when it did break, what failed was the hydrogel itself, not the bond between the adhesive and the tissue, demonstrating an unprecedented level of simultaneous high adhesion strength and matrix toughness.
Practicals tests confirm stability
The researchers tested their adhesive on a variety of both dry and wet pig tissues including skin, cartilage, heart, artery, and liver, and found that it bound to all of them with significantly greater strength than other medical adhesives. The tough adhesive also maintained its stability and bonding when implanted into rats for two weeks, or when used to seal a hole in a pig heart that was mechanically inflated and deflated and then subjected to tens of thousands of cycles of stretching. Additionally, it caused no tissue damage or adhesions to surrounding tissues when applied to a liver hemorrhage in mice – side effects that were observed with both super glue and a commercial thrombin-based adhesive.
Material decomposes after application
Such a high-performance material has numerous potential applications in the medical field, either as a patch that can be cut to desired sizes and applied to tissue surfaces or as an injectable solution for deeper injuries. It can also be used to attach medical devices to their target structures, such as an actuator to support heart function. “This family of tough adhesives has wide-ranging applications,” says co-author Adam Celiz, who is now a Lecturer at the Department of Bioengineering, Imperial College London. “We can make these adhesives out of biodegradable materials, so they decompose once they've served their purpose.”
