Monday, February 12, 2007

Surgeon makes 'gel gun' to heal female athletes' injuries

By Lucy Caldwell-Stair

Children's Hospital Boston's orthopedic surgeon Martha Murray is determined to mitigate the knee injuries that plague teenage girls who play sports. Going after the problem on two fronts, she's perfecting a glue gun that injects healing gel deep in the knee, and she's training coaches on how girls can avoid tearing ligaments in the first place.

"Female athletes are about five times more likely to tear the ACL than male athletes in sports such as soccer," says Murray, because their leg muscles are not as developed as boys'. Altogether, more than 200,000 Americans suffer tears to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) every year, she says.

Initial funding to make her gel gun came from the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT), a consortium of 11 Boston-area hospitals and over 65 industry partners. Murray has received about $1 million in grants in total, including funding from the National Institutes of Health.

The gel she's made serves as a scaffold for cells near the injured area to grow and thus reconnect the ligament pieces. Usually a blood clot is the scaffold, but not in torn knees. To make the gel, she combined blood platelets with a collagen hydrogel and added growth factors. A team of MIT engineering students helped design the glue gun.

Results have been promising, experts say. "Her techniques could be in clinical trials by 2009," says CIMIT director John Parrish.

Medical suppliers TNCO Inc. and Smith & Nephew Plc are providing support to commercialize her surgical tool and technique, and her research team at Children's Hospital has grown to six people.

At quarterly sports clinics around the state, Murray urges six weeks of preseason training for strengthening, flexibility and balancing work for young female athletes to help prevent ACL injuries. Murray is working to get the program into junior high and high schools in Massachusetts and nationally.

Lucy Caldwell-Stair is a freelance writer in Newton.