Egg shells could be used to help grow human bone fragments to repair broken or chipped bones.
Bones grow inside the body on a kind of scaffold called the extracellular matrix, which helps guide and feed bone-growing cells. Artificial scaffolds can be used to grow pieces of bone outside the body, which are then surgically implanted to repair broken bones, but these don鈥檛 always work well and can lead to complications.
at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and her colleagues 3D printed an artificial scaffold made from crushed up chicken egg shells mixed with a mouldable plastic called polycaprolactone.
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鈥淯sed chicken egg shells are reinforcement materials and polymers for bone regeneration,鈥� says Camci-Unal. 鈥淓gg shells might just look like leftover waste after cooking an omelette, but in the lab we are repurposing them to fabricate tissue templates.鈥�
The researchers tested scaffolds that incorporated different amounts of egg shell microparticles by adding cells that turn into bone-growing cells. After 14 days, they found that the scaffold had encouraged the cells to start developing into bone-growing cells called osteoblasts.
鈥淓gg shells contain some of the actual components that already exist in native bone, so when we make a scaffold material out of them, we鈥檙e tricking the body to think that the material is its own,鈥� says Camci-Unal.
The egg shell scaffold could provide a cheaper and more sustainable alternative to current artificial scaffolds, says Camci-Unal. However, the study only observed cells in the scaffold for a short time, so it would need to be tested inside the body for longer before it can be used to help repair real bones.
ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces
