Technique may yield vocal cord stand-in. (Materials Science).A plastic material used in some biological implants could someday form a foundation for tissue that can repair or replace human vocal cords vocal cords: see larynx. Vocal cords The pair of elastic, fibered bands inside the human larynx. The cords are covered with a mucous membrane and pass horizontally backward from the thyroid cartilage (Adam's apple) to insert on , new experiments suggest. Developing a surrogate for the body's soft tissues can be difficult because the components often have a complex cellular structure, says Patrick A. Tresco, a bioengineer at the University of Utah The University of Utah (also The U or the U of U or the UU), located in Salt Lake City, is the flagship public research university in the state of Utah, and one of 10 institutions that make up the Utah System of Higher Education. in Salt Lake City. Vocal cords are particularly challenging because any implant would need to be especially sturdy. Although human vocal cords are only about 1 centimeter centimeter (sĕn`tĭmē'tər), abbr. cm, unit of length equal to 0.01 meter, the basic unit of length in the metric system. The centimeter is the unit of length in the cgs system. It is approximately equal to 0. long, they undergo 1-millimeter vibrations and experience accelerations about 200 times that of Earth's gravity Earth's gravity, denoted by g, refers to the attractive force that the Earth exerts on objects on or near its surface (or, more generally, objects anywhere in the Earth's vicinity). . Tresco and his colleagues have induced certain human cells to grow upon and fill the pores within an elastic foam that's about 70 percent open space. When the foam was stretched once every 4 seconds, 8 hours per day for 9 days, the living cells became structurally aligned like those deep within vocal cord vocal cord Either of two folds of mucous membrane that extend across the interior cavity of the larynx and are primarily responsible for voice production. Sound is produced by the vibration of the folds in response to the passage between them of air exhaled from the lungs. tissue. When the foam was also vibrated at high frequency while it was being stretched, the cells took on a more disordered pattern, like that in the tissue just beneath a vocal cord's skin. Tests of the tissue-foam combination showed that under stress and strain, the material behaved just like vocal cord tissue does when it's similarly exercised. Also, because patients could donate their own cells to create a vocal cord implant, the tissue would probably not be rejected.--S.P. |
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