If you thought sheepskin paper, also known as vellum, is gross, get ready for “tissue paper” from Northwestern University. The material, made from organs mixed with a polymer in a multi-step process, may have a number of uses that are obvious, such as wound repair, and others that will have to be discovered.
The tissue paper is made by first breaking up an organ into tiny pieces and then using well-established methods to decellularize the resulting clear goop. The goop is then dried, turned into a powder, and combined with polymer molecules. What comes out is a paper that can be used within the body because it consists of biologically safe structural proteins and polymer, but which can be bent like origami to have desired shapes and strength.
Ovarian, kidney, liver, muscle, and other tissues from pigs and cows were successfully converted to tissue papers, each having different qualities that may be useful in different situations. To test the viability of the material to be used for regenerative medicine, the researchers used tissue paper made from a cow’s ovary to generate ovarian follicles that actually produced the hormones they would normally make. “This could provide another option to restore normal hormone function to young cancer patients who often lose their hormone function as a result of chemotherapy and radiation,” in a Northwestern announcement said Teresa Woodruff, a coauthor of the study appearing in journal Advanced Functional Materials.