Toray has announced that it has created a new bioabsorbable polymer with skin-like flexibility that recovers to its original shape even after being stretched 10 times the original length.
The company has achieved this by using its functional polymer design technology and designed a polymer with high bio-followability and absorbability. It is highly flexible, rupture resistant and has restoration properties equivalent to biological tissue. It has also identified technology to improve the degradation speed of the polymer by 10 times through hydrolysis.
Previously polylactic acid and polyglycolic acid, which are bio-absorbable polymers, were used but they tended to form crystals and become hard, which made it difficult to provide both flexibility and rupture resistance properties. Toray developed a special co-polymerization method using lactide, dimers of lactic acid, and caprolactone, and achieved both flexibility and rupture resistance enabling recovery without rupture even after being stretched to 10 times the original length.
The technology is expected to be applied to tissue reconstruction treatment such as regenerative medicine, where flexibility and rupture resistance to follow the movements of organs and biological tissues are required.
