Bio-inspired glue shows promising results in heart repair
Imagine your garden hose suddenly springs a leak as you’re watering your begonias, and you can’t turn it off. Water is shooting out of the side of the hose and soaking you. How would you rather engineer a quick fix? With a needle and thread or a patch and glue that takes about 5 seconds to set? Now imagine it’s one of your arteries. 
That’s the situation doctors face in repairing hearts. When a cardiovascular tear or other abnormality causes blood loss through the tissue they must stop the bleeding as fast as possible and with a robust fix.
Stitches, by nature, require puncturing the tissue. Adhesives are typically unsuitable because of the wet environment. The pulsation caused by the heart beat means a rigid repair is also untenable.
Some clever engineering is in order. Fortunately, some of the most capable engineers are some of the least likely to be doing heart surgery. You just need to know where to look.
As reported by Txchnologist, in this case, you look in the ocean. There you’ll find the sandcastle worm. This humble polymer engineer produces a natural polymer as a sort of mortar to build tube reefs from sand and other small ocean debris.
The synthetic equivalent is known as poly(glycerol sebacate acrylate) (PGSA). This polymer is biodegradable, elastic and transparent. In animal trials, the performance has been superb.
As described by Dr. Pedro del Nido, the chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital and one of the senior authors of a study published in Science Translational Medicine on Jan. 8th, “This adhesive platform addresses all of the drawbacks of previous systems in that it works in the presence of blood and moving structures. It should provide the physician with a completely new, much simpler technology and a new paradigm for tissue reconstruction to improve the quality of life of patients following surgical procedures.”
The process works something like patching a bike tube or an air mattress. The PGSA is applied to a patch and then placed over the damaged area. The patch is then subjected to UV light and cures in as little as 5 seconds.
This is another example of biomimetics driving engineering innovation. Could this material have been developed without the help of the sandcastle worm? Probably, but it might not have happened for some time. That leaves a question. Does the sandcastle worm community get intellectual property rights?
The video below describes how the process works.
Images courtesy of Txchnologist
