The combination of graphene nanoribbons made with a process developed at Rice University and a common polymer could someday be of critical importance to healing damaged spinal cords in people, according to Rice chemist James Tour.
The Tour lab has spent a decade working with graphene nanoribbons, starting with the discovery of a chemical process to ‘unzip’ them from multiwalled carbon nanotubes, as featured in a Nature article in 2009. Since then, the researchers have used them to enhance materials for the likes of deicers for airplane wings, better batteries and less-permeable containers for natural gas storage.
Now their work to develop nanoribbons for medical applications has resulted in a material, dubbed Texas-PEG, that may help knit damaged or even severed spinal cords.
Graphene nanoribbons customised for medical use by William Sikkema, a Rice graduate student and co-lead author of the paper, are highly soluble in polyethylene glycol (PEG), a biocompatible polymer gel used in surgeries, pharmaceutical products and in other biological applications. When the biocompatible nanoribbons have their edges functionalised with PEG chains and are then further mixed with PEG, they form an electrically active network that helps the severed ends of a spinal cord reconnect.
“Neurons grow nicely on graphene because it’s a conductive surface and it stimulates neuronal growth,” said Tour.
In experiments at Rice and elsewhere, neurons have been observed growing along graphene.
“We’re not the only lab that has demonstrated neurons growing on graphene in a petri dish,” said Tour. “The difference is other labs are commonly experimenting with water-soluble graphene oxi