Car crashes, battle wounds, and surgeries can leave people with gaping holes in soft tissue that are often too large for their bodies to repair. Now, researchers have developed a nanofiber-reinforced injectable gel that can rebuild missing muscle and connective tissues by serving as a scaffold and recruiting the body’s wound-healing cells. So far, the team has tested the material only in rats and rabbits. But if it performs as well in humans, it could give reconstructive surgeons a fast and easy way to help patients regenerate lost tissues without scarring or deformity.
“Soft tissue losses are a ubiquitous problem in clinical medicine,” says Sashank Reddy, a reconstructive surgeon at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. Surgeons can transplant tissue from another body region to the injury site. But that involves trauma for patients and tissue loss from another part of the body. Surgeons can also insert synthetic implants. But immune cells typically just wall off those implants, leaving behind thick, fibrous scars.
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