In the last year, I have become involved in a couple of interesting little online literature/design research projects with high school students through the Cambridge Centre for International Research. In these projects, a gifted high school student follows a 14 hour (with one or two hours online discussions per week) programme centred around a research topic that are of mutual interests to me and the student and ends up in a student-led report in the format of a research paper.
A project on the potential of biomimetic silk conduits for repairing peripheral nerve damage led by Stuti Jain from Newport Highschool, Washington, USA has been published in the Journal of Emerging Investigators, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to research led by high school students.
In the paper, we used Google Scholar to identify trends and gaps in the research on biomimetic silk conduits and highlight potential for further research and development by reviewing particularly promising papers. We found that the research on biomimetic conduits in general, and on silkworm silk conduits in particular has been growing rapidly in recent years and that the performance of the best of these silk conduits is almost as good as the traditional nerve grafts. However, it is clear that more research is needed before the full potential of using the biocompatible and biodegradable silk is realised.
Abstract
Peripheral nerves are critical because they function as a relay between the brain, spinal cord, and the rest of the body. However, because the peripheral nervous system is not protected by bones, it is vulnerable to injuries. Severe peripheral nerve injuries (PNIs) are categorized by the presence of nerve gaps – spaces between two ends of a transected nerve. Common treatments for such injuries are nerve grafts or synthetic conduits, but these treatments have various limitations which have led to research into the development of silk conduits for PNIs. In order to examine this novel research field, we employed a bibliometric analysis, a form of analysis where statistical methods are used to interpret previously collected data. We created and applied a 3-analysis method that provided both quantitative and qualitative information. The methodology was developed to answer our three research questions: 1) How has the field of peripheral nerve regeneration conduit research, and its subfields, grown in the past 20 years? 2) What are previous successful and unsuccessful approaches? 3) What are possible areas for future studies? The growth analysis we conducted showed a clear increase in total number of papers published about conduits per year, especially for silk conduits. Our analysis also revealed that silk conduits performed almost as well as nerve grafts and identified some promising properties for further in vivo testing, including biocompatibility, biodegradability and the ability to bridge any length of gap
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