This Halloween, when you see skeleton decorations, I suggest that you look inward and think about how your body works to keep you strong and structured. 

Unlike most fictional representations of skeletons, most bones don’t completely fall apart if they have a small crack. Usually, most bones heal these small breaks on their own. They do this by completing a four-step process: inflammation, soft-callous formation, hard-callous formation, and finally bone reformation.

But sometimes, if the gap is too large, it might be too hard for the bone to repair itself. In this case, a painful surgery called a bone graft is performed. But don’t worry, researchers are working toward a simpler, less painful way to promote bone regrowth.

Ordinarily, a bone graft is a procedure that fills the space between a bone, giving the body a framework to grow into. 

Surgeons may take the extra bone needed for the graft from another part of the body, like the hip, which now means the patient has two surgical sites to take care of. Over time, blood vessels and bone-forming cells enter the grafted area and build new bone. 

In a new research project, researchers were interested in children with a cleft lip in the upper jaw — this repair could create support for their permanent teeth to grow in. 

That need for a bridge is what researchers hope to address. 

They have experimented and made a “nanobone,” which is made of tiny, biodegradable calcium aluminosilicate particles. So, instead of just merely filling the gap, the particles help activate TGF-𝞫1, a repair signal already found in the body. That signal attracts cells to it and these cells can turn into bone-forming cells. 

The material also helps the blood clot quickly, stabilizing as the healing begins. It also is done in the one surgical site, no need for a second wound. This is still in the research stage: the bone-growth results have come from rats, not children.

To see whether the signals actually transferred into the new bone, the researchers tested the material in rats with gaps in their skull bones. 

After eight weeks, the treated (defected) rats had about eighty percent more bone volume than the control (defected) group! That is a very encouraging result, but of course, a rat skull is different from a human bone, or a child’s jaw. Researchers still need to determine whether the material is safe and works for people.

The next step is to see if these results are viable outside of the lab and in the human body. Researchers will need to study how safely the particles will break down and whether they can help larger, more complex bone defects before testing them in people. They are also looking at ways to put the material into 3D-printed scaffolding shaped for individual patients. If these future studies succeed, the approach could one day help with cleft-related jaw gaps, injuries, and other difficult bone repairs. 

For now, simply avoiding bone grafts is the goal.

SIDEBAR

Wait-Isn’t NanoBone Already a Thing?

Yes, but it’s a different material. NanoBone® is an existing synthetic bone graft substitute made from hydroxyapatite, a mineral found in bone, and a silica-based matrix. It is put into a bone defect to simply support bone growth. This article focuses on the experimental “nanobone” that is made from calcium aluminosilicate particles to activate the body’s repair signals. The similar names make them easy to confuse, but the rat study didn’t test the NanoBone® product. 

Our bodies are very strong, and not as scary as skeleton decorations may make them out to be. They are helpful and hard working in making sure we are stable and healthy. Our bodies already have these repair signals and other tools to regrow bone, but the challenge is getting the signals to work across a large gap. 

This new material could be a promising way to help, but its evidence is still limited to that preclinical trial research. If it does well in its future studies, repairing bone might someday require less bone to be taken from somewhere else in the body, which means less pain for those who are already suffering.