First breakthrough
In the late 1960s a team of scientists at Imperial College London developed the first ‘bioglass’, a man-made material that could be used to repair bones, joints and teeth. Nearly 40 years later another team at Imperial College discovered a new kind of Bioglass that worked even better. Collaborating with Professor Mark Smith, a physicist at Warwick University’s new Nuclear-Magnetic Resonance unit, they began to discover why.

Dissolving glass
This project required a range of different specialisms as the bioglass needs very specific properties. The team came up with a way to give the glass ‘porosity’ so that when the bioglass is implanted it can interact with body fluid. ‘The reaction between the body fluid and the glass has two effects,’ says Smith. ‘It stimulates growth and bone, and at the same time it starts to dissolve away, so eventually the glass is completely removed from the body by natural processes. You will have actually grown new and healthy bone where the glass was. The trick is to create a glass that elicits the biological response that grows bone, and at the same time dissolves away. This is why it has required a team to understand the different aspects of this problem.’ Through using Warwick’s new Nuclear-Magnetic Machine the team could see calcium rushing out of the bioglass into the new bones.

Imperial College discovered how to make the system porous, and the second part of the project ‘was a group effort,’ says Smith, ‘realising that it was actually calcium ions moving around the systems was a great determining step. You could only prove that, beyond doubt, by bringing together information that three of the groups could separately get.’