Protecting Medical Implants with Crystalline Shield 1

Protecting Medical Implants with Crystalline Shield 1

Shady Farah and Joshua C. Doloff of the Anderson/Langer Lab

Koch Institute at MIT, MIT Department of Chemical Engineering, Institute of Medical Engineering and Science

Implantable medical devices have revolutionized the modern medicine and treatment approaches, however, their benefits and long-term use is humbled by the immune-mediated foreign body response and implant failure. This image clearly presents cell's devices loaded with the developed novel targeted drugs crystals to prevent host rejection of transplanted materials.

We have found that by having this special type of crystals co-encapsulated with insulin producing cells we could successfully able to prevent a rejection of these cell's devices and curing insulin-dependent-diabetes (T1D) for few years without the need of insulin injection or other medications. This technology can be applied for various types of cells encapsulation, medical devices and therapies. These images were taken to study how the encapsulated crystals are fixed inside the spheres (cell's device), their distribution and to follow their stability at different condition.

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