UA polymer researcher’s work wins international award for young scientists
A University of Akron polymer researcher whose innovations might soon help save the limbs of soldiers severely wounded in battle has won an international award for early-career scientists.
Dr. Matthew Becker, professor of polymer science, is a winner of the 2015 Young Investigator Award presented by the American Chemical Society journals Biomacromolecules, Macromolecules and ACS Macro Letters.
Dr. Matthew Becker
The award honors scientists, chemists or engineers age 40 or younger worldwide who have made a major impact in polymer science. Becker, 39, shared this year’s award with Dr. Brent Sumerlin, associate professor of chemistry at the University of Florida.
Becker’s Laboratory for Functional Biomaterials develops biodegradable polymers for medical applications. Chief among these is a polymer tube designed to replace sections of arm and leg bones destroyed by battle wounds or removed during surgery. The tube, called a scaffold, is treated with biochemical signals that spur bone regrowth. Over time, the tube disappears.
Hopeful results
Becker’s research team and collaborators at Methodist Hospital Research Institute in Houston and at Akron Polymer Systems have been testing the tubes for the U.S. Department of Defense. In trials with sheep, legs in which a section of bone has been replaced with a polymer tube have regrown the bone in four months. Recent advances in the technology could cut that full recovery time by as much as half, Becker says.
The Akron and Houston researchers are finalists for another large Defense Department grant that would extend the sheep testing and also fund a human clinical trial of the technique, starting as early as this fall. Soldiers who suffer serious limb injuries in battle would be eligible for the trial as an alternative to amputation.
Becker’s research team is unusual in that it bridges polymer science, medicine and organic chemistry. The first-generation polymer tubes were extruded in the laboratory of Dr. Avraam Isayev, UA distinguished professor of polymer engineering.
“If I wasn’t in Akron, this probably never would have happened,” said Becker, who arrived at UA six years ago. “It’s been a real advantage here because within the college we have all the expertise necessary to work on complicated projects like this and colleagues willing to help each other.”
Becker will receive his $3,000 Young Investigator Award in August at the American Chemical Society’s Fall National Meeting in Boston.
Media contact: Roger Mezger, 330-972-6482 or 330-730-4215, or rmezger@uakron.edu.