A tendon injury may happen suddenly and result in permanent alteration of an athlete’s lifestyle. It means an inflammation of the tendon.
Jeff Ruberti is a professor of bioengineering at the Northeastern University. He was injured in 2017 while playing pickup soccer at a conference when he planted his foot to change directions. At that time, there were just a few options available for tendon repair which did not always give patients full former mobility.
Ruberti studies collagen, which is the connective tissue holding together most of our body. He thinks that manipulation with collagen may help in the faster recovery for tendon injury. Collagen is the structural molecule in vertebrate animals. In every tissue, it takes different forms, from tendons to corneas. It’s made up of tiny little strands of molecules which assemble into bigger and bigger strands that hold our cells in place.
Ruberti found that if you start pulling on these molecules, they start to snap into place with one another, and form recognisable, string-like structures. According to him, were it possible to put collagen molecules into a wound site and apply the right load to them, it could allow damaged tendons to heal more quickly than existing methods. However, it is a very difficult task because injecting loose collagen into a tendon won’t help much, since most of it will float away from the wound before it can self-assemble. To be successful, the molecules have to stay directly on the damaged tissue while the surrounding muscle flexes and pulls the site, causing the collagen molecules to link together.
To accomplish this, Ruberti’s lab manipulated collagen into two different forms. The first is a gel-like material called “metastable” collagen, which can supply loose collagen molecules to a wounded tendon. The other is a stable, dense mat of collagen that can wrap around the tendon, holding the gel in place. He believes that if we stimulate the calf muscle to contract a little, the tendon may start to incorporate those molecules. The collagen may assemble long strands where the cells that create living tendons, can then settle down and grow.
Ruberti has already started thinking about bringing this technique to market. He’s started a small company with Patrick Bradley, his former doctoral student at Northeastern, and Adam Hacking, a former orthopedics researcher, which he hopes will eventually turn his lab’s work into a viable treatment.
Shahjadi Jemim Rahman
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