A synthetic, temperature-sensitive gel could help surgeons reconnect blood vessels more quickly, safely, and easily. The new gel, successfully tested in rats, could also enable more complex robotic surgery as well as minimally invasive surgery.
There have been few advances in the art of reconnecting blood vessels since French surgeon Alexis Carrel received the Nobel Prize in 1912 for his method of sewing them together. About a decade ago, surgeon Geoffrey Gurtner found himself longing for a substance that could be poured into the tiny blood vessels he was struggling to reconnect in order to prop them open while he sewed them together. "A lot of surgeries require reconnecting vessels," he says. "For two-thirds of operations, this would be helpful."
When Gurtner took a post at Stanford University, he partnered with a group of Stanford chemical engineers and biomaterials experts who adapted a substance called Poloxymer 407, which is already approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for internal use, to do the job.
The trick was to tweak the properties of the substance so that it changes from a liquid to a solid state a few degrees above body temperature. The group used a halogen lamp to heat up the area around a severed blood vessel in rats, added the poloxymer, and then sealed the two ends with surgical glue.
"The liquid turns into a solid, and then instead of a bunch of collapsible floppy pieces of linguini, you have something like pixie sticks," Gurtner says. After connecting them, "you're left with a scarless joint between the two blood vessels."
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