Achilles' Heal

Perhaps if this research had come just a few millennia earlier, Achilles’ heel wouldn’t have been such a vulnerability. Researchers working to improve recovery for people with tendon and ligament injuries are increasingly interested in synthetic hydrogels – injectable material that can encourage regrowth. There have also been recent strides in techniques that use microparticles to deliver dissolvable factors to the right spot. Now a study has combined these approaches to create a hydrogel system with fibres (pink) and microgels (green) carrying dissolvable factors. Starter cells for regrowth (blue/yellow) were recruited along the fibres, their development helped by both the physical landscape and the delivery of soluble cues in a lab model (pictured) and in ruptured mouse Achilles tendons. If the injection of a hydrogel including fibres and microparticles can boost the body’s ability to repair, recovery time after all too common tendon and ligament injuries could be greatly reduced.

Written by Anthony Lewis

Anthony Lewis

Writer

Ant was the web editor in the early days of BPoD, and has since worked with the UK’s top science organisations as a writer and multimedia producer. He now splits his time between freelance work and managing multimedia at The Lancet.

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• Image from work by Robert N. Kent III and colleagues
• Department of Biomedical Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
• Image originally published with a Creative Commons Attribution – NonCommercial – NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
• Published in Advanced Functional Materials, September 2022