Sweet Job: Using Cotton Candy to Generate Artificial Human Tissue
Don't you want some?
The summer approaches, and so does the anticipation for fairs, the beach, and barbecues. Fairs and carnivals I think are going to be particularly exciting this year, as my son is at that age where he’s just old enough for some of the slightly more exciting rides with his dad, and he’s able to partake in one of my summer-fair favorites: cotton candy.
Oh sure, there are plenty of other treats that you’ll find while strolling along the boardwalk. Kettle corn, candied apples and frozen yogurt will adorn the signs of small shops beside us, but I’ll have that light, stringy, melt-in-your mouth candy to keep me occupied.
Well, if a team of researchers at the New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weil Cornell Medical Center and from the Ithaca campus have their way, the summer treat won’t only be something you can enjoy eating. Cotton candy, they discovered, is a perfect substance for creating a series of small tubes that will eventually become blood vessels in newly regenerated human tissue.
The problem with existing methods is that they can only generate delicate replacement tissue no thicker than a few millimeters, because they lack the appropriate structure to support delivery of nutrients through blood in the body. The crystalline sugar in cotton candy, however, allows scientists to create tiny tubes that can ferry blood between natural tissue and an artificial graft. A common cotton candy machine was used in the experiments in order to create the fine fibers needed to generate the “vessels.” A polymer is poured over the fibers and allowed to harden. It’s then dipped into warm water, which dissolves the cotton candy and leaves a network of tiny vessels behind.
The biodegradable polymer’s tunnels are then lined with cells to create artificial blood vessels, and the rest of the chunk is lined with immature cells of whatever tissue is being regenerated. The cells eventually dissolve the polymer and result in a useable tissue that can be larger than previous types of artificial tissue.
This process, of course, has only been explored in the initial stages and it could be years before we actually see any human applications in the world of medicine. Presumably, the low cost of sugar would help keep this kind of procedure relatively inexpensive, and I can see this methodology being pretty useful in all kinds of medical applications, plastic surgery being the first to come to mind, but perhaps even as a tool to repair damage to other organs throughout the body.
If you’d like to read the original paper, “Fabrication of an artificial 3-dimensional vascular network using sacrificial sugar structures,” you can click here to go to the February Soft Matter science journal. Perhaps you can do it while enjoying your favorite type of cotton candy.
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