If the bionic man ever becomes reality, his skeleton may be magnetic.Artificial bone implants can help fix damaged skeletons, but they can also prevent the healthy growth of natural bone around the implant, weakening the bond between them.
Various ways of encouraging growth and preventing infection have been tried – among them impregnating bone implants with growth hormones and using anti-inflammatory drugs and antibiotics. But these methods provide only a single dose of treatment and if the problem recurs there is little that can be done to treat it without surgery.
One possibility is to attach the drug to magnetic particles and steer them through the body to the relevant site using an external magnetic field. But using that field to hold the drug-bearing particles in place for hours or days is impractical.
Making bone implants magnetic, so that the particles simply stick to them, could get around that, says Zachary Forbes, a surgeon at Drexel University College of Medicine in Philadelphia, US.
He adds magnetic powder to the biopolymer used in bone implants so that they can be made magnetic for an extended time, using the same strong magnetic field used to steer drug particles.
Read the full magnetic bone implant patent application.
Justin Mullins, New Scientist consultant