07:28 p.m Aug 18, 1997 Eastern
WASHINGTON, Aug 18 (Reuter) - U.S. researchers said on Monday they had found a new material that could help regrow damaged nerves.
Robert Langer and colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University said the material, polypyrrole, worked well as a bridge to allow damaged nerve cells to grow together.
Tests on rats showed the body accepted the grafts without much risk of rejection by the immune system, they reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
``It's a plastic, like a regular piece of plastic, but the neat thing about it is that it conducts electricity,'' Langer said in a telephone interview.
``If you put current through it, it acts like a wire, but it's compatible with cells. When you apply the electric field, they grow really well.''
Langer said polypyrroles were experimental new materials and this was their first major medical application.
Langer's team had been working on stimulating new nerve cell growth but ran into problems in trying to get individual cells to connect.
``It seemed to me I could put nerve cells on a piece of plastic and shoot an electrical field through them to make them grow,'' he said.
Langer said tests in humans were some time off. ``We have more animal studies to do,'' he said. ``I don't want to generate any false hope.''
He said there could be two potential applications. ``One would be peripheral nerve damage, when somebody gets something like a hand cut off or a finger cut off ... or facial nerve damage,'' he said. ``The other would be spinal cord.''
But because there was a risk that the plastic implant could interfere with other nerve connections, the material would have to be made biodegradable, Langer said.
The polypyrroles could be made into films, stretched into strands or given various
other forms, he said.
REUTERS
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