Rice comes to surgeon's aid

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INNOVATION

Rice comes to surgeon's aid
Published: 13/10/2009 at 12:00 AM
Newspaper section: News
A Chiang Mai University physician has won a top national technology award for turning rice starch into medical hydrogel that stops bleeding during surgical operations.

Sittiporn Punyanitya, a medical researcher at CMU's Faculty of Medicine, received the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA) award for his invention of a rice starch acidic gel for hemostasis.

Dr Sittiporn said he had found ways to "add value to Thai rice by turning it into industrial products, particularly expensive medical materials", according to the university's Research Administration Centre which has published his research on its website.

To turn the rice into a haemostatic material, his research team needed to use starch, or a carbohydrate complex in rice, to create a hydrogel - a gelatin-like material with excellent absorbent quality.

It had proven to be a big help to surgeons during operations. Bleeding could occur in internal organs and the hydrogel could be used to patch wounds or damaged areas of organs to stop blood flowing, Dr Sittiporn said.

Another innovation, also based on rice starch, is a biodegradable suture used by surgeons to stitch tissues and wounds.

Dr Sittiporn's research team mixes polymer, or large molecules of rice starch, with such substances as Carboxymethyl cellulose and nanometre-sized carbon particles in a process to make a suture.

Such preparations sound technical to those unfamiliar with science, but in fact, Dr Sittiporn said, "to invent it is so simple".

All the materials are mixed in hot water before being dried in an electric oven. The final product, he said, is a suture of one-millimetre diameter but strong enough to lift a water bottle weighing 400 grammes.

The black colour of the nano-carbon particles also allows doctors to easily differentiate between a suture and blood, he said.

Other award winners came up with innovations on tailor-made fertiliser for different soils, a new iron-casting technology, and modified acrylic resin for energy saving, the NSTDA announced at a press conference yesterday.