MIT students discover med-tech devices that disintegrate staples

MIT students discover med-tech devices that disintegrate staples, The discovery is based on a recent study in which eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn), which is an alloy of gallium, was successfully able to break down medical devices made of aluminum.

During a study conducted in the lab of Giovanni Traverso, assistant professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, students had been working on producing devices that could stay in the digestive tract of humans for prolonged periods of time while drugs were administered to them over a course of days or possibly weeks, one key issue that the students in the study faced was how to remove said devices once the treatment was complete without having to resort to surgical procedures as is customary. 

As a result, the device dissolving project was initiated, the results of which have been published in the journal of Advanced Materials. In the study, it was discovered that eutectic gallium-indium (EGaIn), a liquid metal alloy of gallium, can effectively break down medical devices made of solid aluminum.

There are certain elements that can cause liquid metal embrittlement. Aluminum happens to be a metal that is susceptible to gallium. What gallium does is it breaks through the grain boundaries of aluminum and fractures it so much that it eventually dissolves. 

Another thing that was observed by researchers was that elements that had been acting as dissolvers prevented a protective layer of oxide from forming on the metal that was being dissolved which in turn sped up the breakdown.

According to Vivian Feig, lead author of the research, “It’s known that certain combinations of liquid metals can actually get into the grain boundaries of solid metals and cause them to dramatically weaken and fail, we wanted to see if we could harness that known failure mechanism in a productive way to build these biomedical devices.”

In the experiment particularly, researchers produced aluminum stents and staples for the GI tract that were exposed to EGaln by painting a coat of it over them. Apart from that, they were also exposed to micro and nanoparticles of the alloy after it had been ingested in order to test Feig’s theory. 

The results revealed that in both cases of exposure, the aluminum devices broke down in a matter of minutes, thus, proving the hypothesis correct. The team of researchers has already moved on to testing the concept on other metals such as the alloy of nickel and titanium, nitinol. The potentially dissolvable alloy is typically used in esophageal stents but may also be used in other devices.

Traverso who also works as a gastroenterologist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital has shared his excitement over the fact that if the phenomenon may become successfully applicable in other settings, it would mean that interventionist methods such as endoscopies and surgical procedures to remove devices would become absolutely unnecessary.

However, additional testing still needs to be conducted before liquid metal embrittlement can completely replace surgical removals, especially toxicity studies. Despite the fact that large doses of gallium did not lead to toxicity in rodents the element of safety in humans is still a concern.

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