New bone glue tested on patients in clinical study for the first time

More than 10 years ago, Håkan Engqvist and Philip Procter began developing a bone glue designed to help repair fractures. Now, the glue has been used on a patient in England for the first time. In early August this year, the bone glue was used on a patient during knee surgery in England. The patient is the first participant in a clinical study evaluating the glue’s effectiveness in treating fractures near joints.

“It’s really exciting to see things moving forward and to reach the stage where there is an actual product in the clinical trial phase,” says Engqvist, professor of applied materials science at the Department of Materials Science.

Today, development of the bone glue is being driven by the Irish company Biomimetic Innovations Ltd., but the original version was created by Engqvist and his colleagues Procter and Gerard Insley in the lab at the Ångström Laboratory. Ten years ago, after securing funding, they began experimenting to achieve the right composition.

“At Ångström, we handled the chemistry and conducted various tests demonstrating that it is possible to bond bone fragments together so securely that they hold fast. To get an initial proof of concept, we tested the glue on cow bones from the slaughterhouse. There is a photo illustrating just how strong the bond was: We glued bones together and hung them from an apple tree with buckets of water suspended beneath them,” says Engqvist.

Breaks down in the body, replaced by bone

The glue—a type of bone-filling material—consists of calcium phosphate and phosphoserine mixed with water. This creates a sticky consistency that hardens rapidly and becomes extremely strong.

“Calcium phosphate occurs naturally in our skeleton, and phosphoserine is also a molecule produced by the body. Over time, the glue breaks down and is replaced by newly formed bone,” says Engqvist.

Studies on small animals conducted at Uppsala University also demonstrated the effectiveness of the bone glue. Subsequently, the Irish company took over and proceeded with larger-scale studies. Now, in collaboration with the University of Leeds Teaching Hospital, it is investigating the glue’s performance in patients. The study focuses on fractures where the bone adjacent to a joint has both cracked and become compressed, necessitating the filling of the resulting void.

“This is the dream for people in biomaterials: to take it out of the lab and see, does it really work? Do surgeons come back to us and say, this is good enough, or do we need to improve it? This is a huge step in the project, and we’re really pleased that we made it this far,” says Procter, founder of Biomimetic Innovations Ltd. and affiliated professor at the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, Uppsala University.

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Lisa Lock

BA art history, MA material culture. Former museum editor, paramedic, and transplant coordinator. Editing for Science X since 2021.

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Andrew Zinin

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