Bioengineers from Rice University have developed a temperature-sensitive gel that starts as a liquid, solidifies into a gel in the body and then liquefies again for removal. The material has been designed for use as a scaffold material for bone regeneration in the head and face.
The gel -- poly(N-isopropylacrylamide), or PNiPAAm -- has been designed to be injected into the body to help direct the formation of new bone that has been lost or damaged through injury or disease. At room temperature it is liquid, but it turns into a more solid gel at body temperature. It could act as an alternative to prefabricated implantable scaffolds.
The material has been developed in the bioengineering lab of Antonios Mikos. Mikos said: "This new platform technology leverages injectable, thermally responsive, chemically crosslinkable and bioresorbable hydrogels for regenerative medicine applications. It enables the formation of scaffolds locally and the delivery of growth factors and stem cells into defects of complex anatomical shapes with minimal surgical intervention."
PNiPAAm's cross-linking technology lets the researchers eliminate shrinkage of the gel, which improves its stability so that it can deliver growth factors and stem cell populations to the area being treated. Once enough bone tissue has regenerated to fill the area, the scaffold can be turned back into a liquid state and reabsorbed by the body.
Mikos believes that the ability to encapsulate stem cell populations with these sorts of temperature-sensitive injectable gel scaffolds will have "enormous implications for the development of novel therapeutics for craniofacial bone regeneration".
A paper on the research has been authored by Tiffany Vo, a fourth-year doctoral graduate student in Mikos' lab, and colleagues.

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