Elastic bones

A group at Northwestern University has created a "hyperelastic bone" scaffold to address the need for a bone-inducing material that is easily manufactured, low cost and easy to manipulate during surgery. While the short-term goal is to create a matrix that can be used alone, the porous property of the biomaterial could allow the team to incorporate BMP2 or new osteogenic growth factors with better safety profiles.

The scaffold, described in a Science Translational Medicinestudy last month, was developed by Ramille Shah, assistant professor of biomedical engineering at the university, whose goal was to find a solution to the manifold problems caused by the products marketed or in development for bone repair. ...