Rebecca Koltun was on a college ski trip at Stratton Mountain in Vermont when she suffered a spinal cord injury that left her paralyzed from the neck down.
Daniel Meninger is running for Spaulding s Race for Rehab Team boston.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from boston.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
<p>Hydrogels are already used in clinical practice for the delivery of drugs, and as lenses, bone cement, wound dressings, 3D scaffolds in tissue engineering and other applications. However, bonding different hydrogel polymers to one another has remained a challenge; yet it could enable numerous new applications. Now, Harvard Wyss and SEAS researchers pioneered a new method that uses a thin film of chitosan, a fibrous sugar-based material derived from the processed outer skeletons of shellfish, to make different hydrogels instantaneously and strongly stick to each other. They used their approach to locally protect and cool tissues, seal vascular injuries, and prevent unwanted “surgical adhesions” of internal body surfaces. </p>