In conventional bone grafting, a bit of bone taken from somewhere else in the body is used to repair another bone damaged by injury or disease. What if there was a way to do a less invasive bone graft? Now there is. The YouTube channel VOA News explains how.
Northwestern University came up with a synthetic bone material called hyperelastic bone. It starts as liquid ink. This can be printed out on 3D printers for synthetic bone grafts. It is easier to manufacture bone that’s just the right size and shape to fit what a person needs instead of trying to fit real bone into the damaged area.
Synthetic bones can be printed in the shape needed or in flat sheets that can be squeezed and molded into the shape needed.
Another advantage of synthetic bone is that it’s more bendable than real bone. This makes it less likely to break once it is implanted into a patient’s body. There are other synthetic bone materials available, but not all can be printed out. Most need to be made in a medical laboratory. No matter what material it is made out of, synthetic bones graft well with natural bone, which grows along with the synthetic material.