Jonathan Wilker, PhD, chemist and materials engineer and professor in the department of chemistry and school of materials engineering at Purdue University talks about using plaques from sticky sea mussels to close wounds during surgery.
What is your area of expertise?
Professor Wilker: We study materials. More specifically, adhesives. We look at adhesives that come from biology, from nature. So, we look at how marine organisms like mussels, barnacles and oysters make adhesives for attaching to rocks and each other. We’re trying to understand what those materials are and then translate the technology that nature has produced into new synthetic materials that we can then use for various applications, one of them being medicine.
Focusing on that, talk to me a little bit more in depth. What is it about these creatures that makes them have benefits for people?
Professor Wilker: If you think about all of the adhesives that we have already you will know, from seeing them at the hardware store, that none of them work in water. If you buy these adhesives nothing is going to stick. In our bodies it is obviously wet. So, there are many surgical applications where it would be great if we could use adhesives instead of sutures, staples and screws. Just when you say staples and screws or sutures it sounds painful and awful. And it is. So, if we could use adhesives instead, that would be great. But the adhesives that we have currently do not work in those kinds of environments. We have some that work, but then they are too toxic, or they do not bond strongly enough. And so what we are doing is looking to nature to try and see, how nature sticks in wet environments, using bio-based materials. Can we translate that technology into medically impactful products and procedures?
Is there a way to describe in laymen’s terms what it is that these sea creatures have that makes them sticky?
Professor Wilker: Exactly how the sea creatures stick themselves to rocks and to each other is one of the things that we are working to figure out now. There are several labs working on this. We will show you, upstairs, the tanks that we have full of the animals and the adhesives that they make. At the simplest level, and this is really reducing it down, but at the simplest level, one of the key components seems to be a unique class of proteins. In general, proteins are sort of the basic machinery of biology. Proteins do many things in life. Much of our bodies are made out of proteins. Even targets for drugs very often are certain proteins. And so what these animals do, it seems, is they make fairly unique modifications to their proteins to turn them into adhesives. And as we understand what those modifications are, we are then making synthetic versions of the materials that we can produce on larger scales. Because we are making the materials ourselves, synthetically, we have the ability to adapt the adhesives to what we might need. For instance, what an animal uses to stick itself to a rock is not likely going to be the exact same thing that you want for a surgical application.
Do you have any examples of products that you’ve developed using your pathology yet? Or are you not to that point of study to development?
Professor Wilker: In our lab, we have developed about five or six new adhesive systems so far. We are always developing new ones, and we’re incorporating different properties into each system. So in one case, we have adhesives that bond underwater strongly. In another case, we have an adhesive that is bio-based and degradable. In yet another case we have a material that is mechanically flexible, or it can be stiff. You can tune these properties. One reason that you might want to do change mechanical properties is that if, say, you are bonding skin you want the adhesive to be flexible. But if you are bonding together bone, you want the adhesive to be really stiff. So we have the ability to tune this aspect of an adhesive. We have another adhesive system that is environmentally sustainable. All the components are derived from plant-based agricultural crops. The very first of these adhesives has just been spun out into a startup company. The company was delayed a bit owing to COVID. But they have just opened up a few weeks ago. So the first adhesive from our lab is just starting to be commercialized. For other we are actively seeking partners to get them into the marketplace and develop biomedical applications for these kind of materials.
What’s the benefit of having an adhesive that is from nature and isn’t a suture or a staple?
Professor Wilker: There are a lot of reasons why you might want to have something developed from natural materials. For instance, natural materials might be less toxic or also degradable. A lot of the materials that we are making for surgical applications are not actually the exact same material that the animals are producing. If you try to extract those materials from the animals, you cannot really get enough material to work with. So if I say, “hey, let’s go get some sutures,” you might start to cringe, right? When you receive sutures, what you are doing is poking holes in healthy tissue and then you are tying things together, creating sites of mechanical stress. You also can pick up infections from these holes. And then there is scarring too. So if you think about plastic surgical applications, we obviously do not want any scarring. It might be better if you could just put a little bit of adhesive there. Staples can cause pain in patients when the metal moves around a little bit through soft tissue. Or if you have ever seen an X-ray image of a bone reconstruction where there is a plate in place. When trying to connect pieces of bone there may be a supporting plate there. You have to screw that plate into the healthy bone, around the separation. The amount of healthy bone that you have to drill out just to hold the plate in place is, to me at least, kind of crazy. In principle, if we could replace all of these joinery methods with adhesives, patient outcomes could be a lot better. And so this is why we are looking to nature for ideas of how we might make adhesives to improve surgical outcomes and join tissues together in less dramatic ways.
Jon, how close are you to bringing that to consumer development?
Professor Wilker: We’re still a ways away. So this is in the years, not months kind of time frame. Right now what we are doing in the lab is bonding together skin and we are also gluing together bone. These tissues are from animals that have already passed away for other reasons. We are starting to look into very specific surgical procedures where adhesives might be a benefit relative to the current joinery methods.
Is there anything I didn’t ask you that you would want people to know about what you and your colleagues are doing?
Professor Wilker: I think that is pretty much it. Basically we are starting from. We look at problems in surgery and see how ideas of what we observe in nature might be able to solve those medical problems. We are first trying to understand how the natural systems work, because a lot is still not known. Then we are trying to translate that newly discovered information into synthetic systems. First we see if we can make the synthetic systems and if they have the properties that we want. From there, we take these new synthetic systems and try to design them specifically for surgical applications. That is sort of the gamut, nature to biomedical materials.
Interview conducted by Ivanhoe Broadcast News.
END OF INTERVIEW
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