MONDAY, June 3, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Requests for samples of something called biorubber have been bouncing in from around the world to the Boston area university lab that developed the new material.
Biorubber is a biodegradable elastic polymer that could be used in tissue engineering to help design and create heart tissue, blood vessels, cartilage, bone and even whole organs for transplant, say the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) scientists who created it.
Their research appears in the June issue of Nature Biotechnology.
Biodegradable polymers that are safe to use in the human body are already used in tissue engineering, drug delivery, and other applications. Whether impregnated with medicine or used as a scaffold for growing cells, the polymers are eventually absorbed by the body when their work is done.
The polymers being used now are hard and brittle. They can't be stretched, and they snap back into their original shape. But many of the body's organs are elastic, and engineering replacement organs requires something that can mimic the original tissues, the MIT researchers say.
Biorubber can do that and is also strong and inexpensive to make, the researchers say.
More information
Here is the MIT news release announcing biorubber's availability for testing.
