French Induction Uses Special Polymers To Help Nerves Recover

About 500,000 Americans suffering nerve injury that need help every year, whether it’s a botched pear pit hack or a woodworking accident. Many will never regain full feeling in their fingers. But a start-up has created an ice and glue that can change this, and they are starting to send it to surgeons in the US.

The French company Tissium is working on modifying and augmenting medical tips with water that adheres to tissue when activated. A biopolymer made of fatty acids and glycerol – both of which occur naturally in the body – this fluid acts like a rubber band to grip the muscles while the muscles repair themselves. They then break down as the body heals, leaving behind tissue.

Peripheral nerves form an extensive network of the nervous system, from the brain and spinal cord to the rest of the body. When one is cut, usually through trauma involving knives or machines, the two sides need to be held together while the tissue gradually repairs itself. Fail to do so, and you’ll be left with symptoms ranging from tremors and numbness to electric stabbing pains.

Reconciling severed nerves requires micro-sutures, which is “a very difficult process,” the founder of the Tissium partnership and deputy director Maria Pereira says, “so we are trying to provide a new method and a better way so that the surrounding nerves can be prepared consistently, with very little talk, and with good results for patients.”

The company tested it with 12 patients in the US who had injured their fingers. All 12 also began to feel heat, pain, texture, and light touch in their fingers – compared to slightly more than 80 percent and other methods. No one reported pain or device-related complications after one year. The treatment is already available for doctors to buy in the US.

“Although more evidence is needed, it is exciting to see advanced medicine and regenerative medicine techniques available to the modern doctor,” says Simran Chana, a surgeon, materials scientist, and director of the Frontier Technologies Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. (Chana is not involved in Tissium’s work.)

Tissium has raised €30 million in private investment from financial firms and family offices to boost sales, the company tells WIRED exclusively, including a €30 million loan from the European Union’s lender, the European Investment Bank. The company will continue to manufacture its product, which received FDA approval last year, in northern France.

The funds will also support the development of using technology in other areas: Tissium hopes to enroll about 200 patients in US trials to help the body recover after hernia treatment. Doctors treat a hernia by pushing the perforated organ or muscle back through the muscle wall and then reinforcing the area with stitches and mesh. Currently, “there may be inconsistencies in the way the sutures are made, which can affect the results,” says Pereira, who is also the company’s director of innovation. He said that Tissium treatment can provide consistency, which can lead to recovery.

While concluding the results of a European study to test the treatment of 78 patients who are repairing a hernia, Pereira says that surgeons can use Tissium’s goo 100 percent of the time and that patients show signs of good health in terms of pain levels, recovery, and work, as well as reducing the number of hernias.

Tissium is also developing heart reconstruction products, which was Pereira’s first job when he was getting his PhD in bioengineering almost 20 years ago. The company plans to start a randomized trial in the US for its heart drug, which the new funding will support.