How a jab of gel could be the surgery-free solution to your bad back | Mail Online

• Clinical trials likely to start in three years

Excruciating: Eighty per cent of Britons suffer with back pain at some point in their lives

An injection that could ease the misery of back pain for millions has been invented by British scientists. 

It contains thousands of microscopic sponge-like particles that inflate and gel together inside the body, repairing damaged and worn-away spinal discs.

Almost everyone over the age of 50 has degeneration of the intervertebral discs, which cushion the vertebrae that make up the various sections of the spine.

Eighty per cent of Britons suffer back pain at some point in their lives.

The most badly damaged discs are treated through surgery in a major operation in which vertebrae are fused together, and patients can take months to recover.

In contrast, it is hoped that patients would be back to normal only days or weeks after treatment with the gel.

The injection, which is the result of 25 years of work at Manchester University, contains billions of tiny particles which form a liquid in the syringe. Once inside the body, they turn into a gel. 

Lead researcher Dr Brian Saunders, of the university’s School of Materials, said:‘It is made up of lots of really, really small microgel particles, sponge-like particles, each about one-thousandth the width of a human hair, floating around in water.

‘When we inject them, they expand and push against each other like a boxful of balloons blowing up and pushing against each other.’

As a result, they lock together, creating a strong, load-bearing material, the journal Soft Matter reports.

 

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Dr Saunders said:‘By the time we get to 50 years old, 97 per cent ofus have degeneration in some of our intervertebral discs and it gets progressively worse. It causes a lot of time off work and is a major issue because as a society we are all getting older and heavier.

‘Treatments go from simple ones like physiotherapy to very severe ones like spinal fusion.

‘That’sa major operation which involves lots of time in hospital and lots of time recovering and there’s not really that much in between, so for years we’ve been working on an injectable approach that doesn’t involve surgery.

‘We hope it could be done in the outpatients part of a hospital, rather than going into a surgical theatre and you’d be in and out, rather than spending days in hospital.’

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