Here at our blog, we have hundreds of posts providing our patients with helpful information. You can browse posts to help you find the right doctor in Northwest Arkansas, you can read through posts with tips for healthy living, and you can even find posts that help put confusing medical terms into perspective. Each and every clinic within the MANA network is meant to help make our patients’ lives healthier and happier, and we want our website to accomplish the same thing (although you should always remember that the Internet cannot replace your doctor).
Every once in a while we stumble across some information that might not be directly usable by our patients, but it’s interesting nonetheless. Like the use of egg whites in medical implants, for example.
Scientists from Zhejiang University in China and Cambridge University in the U.K. have developed dissolvable circuitry using whites that could be used with some medical device implants or as a part of advanced drug delivery.
The researchers built a component known as a memristor, which is a key component of circuitry that regulates electric currents. The memristor was built by “embedding magnesium and tungsten electrodes onto an ultra-thin albumen (egg white) film.”
Traditional implants often remain in the body after they have fulfilled their purpose. It’s possible for these implants to pose a risk of infection or cause other complications. These dissolvable egg white circuits could potentially replace traditional components that remain in the body after they are no longer needed.
Lab tests showed that these egg white circuits were as stable and reliable as traditional non-degradable circuits. The only difference is that the egg white circuits dissolve in water after 72 hours. Another advantage to these egg white circuits is that they might show have anti-microbial properties.
The research is still quite new, so it could be a while before these circuits are actually put into use, but it’s certainly an interesting concept.