Bioabsorbable surgical suture

Keywords biomedical material, biomedical application, compatibility, tissue engineering scaffold, controllable dmg delivery, bioabsorbable surgical sutures... 

Barrows, T.H. (1991) Synthetic bioabsorbable polymers, in M. Szycher (ed.), High Performance Biomaterials, Technomic Publ., Lancaster PA, pp. 243-257. Benicewicz, B.C. and Hopper, P.K. (1991) Polymers for absorbable surgical sutures-Part II. J. Bioact. Comp. Polym. 6, 64-95. 

Nakamura, T., Shimizu, Y., Matsui, T., Okumura, N., Hyon, S.H. and Nishiya, A. (1992) A novel bioabsorbable monofilament surgical suture made from (s-caprolactone, L-lactide) copolymer, in H. Planck, M. Dauner and M. Renardy (eds.). Degradation Phenomena on Polymeric Biomaterials, Springer-Verlag, Berlin-Heidelberg, pp. 153-162. 

These low molecular weight copolymers have been found useful in the fabrication of surgical articles, particularly in bioabsorbable coatings for sutures due to their very soft, pliable characteristics. 

This chapter covers polymeric medical devices that are essential for surgical operation focusing in particular on bioabsorbable devices. Since some of these devices such as bone fixatives and drug delivery systems are covered in details in other chapters, bioabsorbable polymers used as sealants/adhesives/hemostatic agents, anti-adhesive barriers, and sutures are discussed. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to comprehensively cover all the research in this rapidly expanding area. Instead, the focus is on commercially available products and some recent research. 

As demonstrated in this chapter, a variety of bioabsorbable polymers, both natural and synthetic, have been investigated as surgical materials and devices. Sutures have the largest market share among the synthetic bioabsorbable polymer used in medicine. Since different types of monofilament and multifilament sutures with... 

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