Carbon nanotubes help heal broken bones

July 8, 2005 | Source: KurzweilAI

Carbon nanotubes make an ideal scaffold for the growth of bone tissue, chemist Robert Haddon of the University of California, Riverside, has found.

The new technique could change the way doctors treat broken bones, allowing them to simply inject a solution of nanotubes into a fracture to promote healing.

Bone tissue is a natural composite of collagen fibers and hydroxyapatite crystals. Haddon and his coworkers have demonstrated for the first time that nanotubes can mimic the role of collagen as the scaffold for growth of hydroxyapatite in bone.

American Chemical Society news release