Ravi Bikramjit Basu : Engineer wins Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Award for creating synthetic bone
This synthetic bone is the work of Bikramjit Basu, a 40-year-old scientist who studied metallurgy (now called materials science) and is one of the eight recipients of India's very own Nobel Prize for young scientists-the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Awards, 2013.
He has won the award in 'engineering sciences' but his research promises to take care of the common man's health woes. In a country where 50 per cent of the population faces risk of some sort of bone disease, Basu has come up with a lab-grown bone.
"Natural bone consists of collagen and something called hydroxyapatite," says Basu. Collagen is a protein that gives bone its resilience, while hydroxyapatite-the source of bone calcium-provides strength and rigidity. For the last four-five years, Basu and his team-first at IIT-Kanpur and then at IISc-has been working on developing an 'implantable biomaterial' that would regenerate bones. "We needed to create something that would have electrical property, biological compatibility, strength and toughness to resist fractures."
His engineering skills came into play: measuring a material's ability to conduct electric current is essentially an engineer's approach. But the problem in hand was fundamentally biological: "Cells in the body communicate with each other by sending and receiving signals," he adds. Signals, from outside the body or from other cells, are passed on though electrical impulse. In a unique experiment in his lab Basu showed that when electrical current was sent in, his bone implants allowed cells to "crosstalk" and grow.
Full article in the link below.
Read more at: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/engineering-sciences-bikramjit-basu-synthetic-bone-shanti-swarup-bhatnagar-award/1/312074.html
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