New surgical method promises to take knife out of plastic surgery | Science

ORLANDO FLORIDA-Plastic surgery today involves gruesome incisions, painful recovery and scar tissue that can last forever. Now a chemist and a doctor have come up with a way to get the knife out of some surgeries – a new method that uses mild electrical pulses to soften tissues so that they can be reshaped without cutting themselves. This week, at the biannual national meeting of the American Chemical Society, the group reported that the technique works on rabbit cartilage as well as on the fibrous tissue of the cornea of ​​the eye. In people, this may one day inspire procedures for quick and painless nose work or corrective eye repair.

"It's simple, rather elegant and important," says Michael Carron, head of plastic and reconstructive surgery at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, who did not participate. The technique has the potential to be widely applied, he says, in treating everything from altered tracheal to deformed ribs.

Brian Wong, head and neck surgeon at the University of California at Irvine, wanted a less invasive method of reshaping cartilage, an essential step in many ear and nose surgeries. Originally, he had been trying to use an infrared laser to heat the cartilage and make it more flexible. This approach worked, but the heat also damaged – and killed – some of the tissue. Then he tried to apply an electric current. It worked better, but he did not know how.

To find out what was going on, Wong is associated with Michael Hill, a chemist at Occidental College in Los Angeles, California. Hill is immersed in cartilage chemistry, composed of spaghettil-like collagen fibers, surrounded by negatively charged proteins and positively charged sodium ions. The higher the density of the charges, the more the cartilage is rigid. Hill's group discovered that the 2-volt current through the fabric electrolyses water molecules and divides them into oxygen and hydrogen ions, or protons. Positive charges on protons cancel negative charges on proteins, making the cartilage more malleable. "Once the fabric is soft, you can shape it as you like," says Hill.

At the meeting, Hill said that his colleagues and himself have now shown that the approach worked in the cornea, the transparent envelope of the eye, rich in collagen. They printed in 3D a rigid contact lens that they then modeled with the help of electrodes, placed on a rabbit eye and briefly crossed by a current, which softened the cornea and remodeled it in the mold of the contact. The procedure worked so well that she even transferred to the cornea tiny imperfections of the contact lens created by the 3D printer.

Hill says that it's unlikely that the technique will show up in your doctor's office in the near future. "It's still very early," he says. But in the future, he thinks, corneal reshaping could replace procedures currently used to correct vision, such as laser eye surgery. Laser surgery does not work for some people and is not reversible; on the contrary, the remolding of the cornea can be repeated if the patient's vision changes. Carron hopes that the procedure will be used even more widely, as collagen-rich tissue is present throughout the body. "I think there are a lot of applications," he says.