Science can be a great inspiration for textiles, but it is also possible for professionals working in the field of textiles to influence the researches of scientists.
A recent essay by researchers at the University of Bordeaux in France seems indeed inspired by traditional textile techniques. Entitled "Human Textiles: a cell-synthesized yarn as a truly 'bio' material for tissue engineering applications" and published in January 2020 on the journal Acta Biomaterialia, the essay focuses on a very special yarn.
Researchers moved from sheets of cell-assembled extracellular matrix (CAM) to develop CAM yarns. Biological yet solid, the sheets are usually mass-produced for clinical applications with normal, adult, human fibroblasts. The sheets of human skin cells were cut into strips and then woven into a yarn-like material that can be braided, twisted, knitted and crocheted.
The yarn can be used for suture to close a wound, but can also be employed for biological, human, tissue-engineered vascular grafts (TEVG). The discovery opens up new possibilities for completely biological tissue-engineered products that are solid and strong, but that do not employ any foreign scaffolding in their structure.
The advantage of using such a material in the medical discipline is that, since the material presents a higher level of biocompatibility compared to ordinary synthetic surgical materials, it can be easily integrated into a patient's body without causing adverse reactions.
Biological yarns employed for basic sutures imply that they would get fully reabsorbed by the human body, reducing the risk of infections and shortening the average time of healing.
This is not the first time scientists at the University of Bordeaux have worked on bio projects: in a previous 2006 research, they produced sheets of biomaterial and created with them tissue-engineered blood vessels (TEBVs)
To prove the yarns they have been producing for this new project were strong enough, researchers created knitted or crocheted samples, showing the different ways the material could be employed and manipulated.
While this new "human yarn" is mainly created for applications in the medical field, you easily wonder if knitting with it will one day be possible. It may sound disturbing and spooky, but it remains a fascinating option and, who knows, maybe the researchers at the University of Bordeaux will one day collaborate with a knitwear designer and take in this way the medical discourse and their scientific discoveries to a more arty level.
Rispondi