EGGSHELLS AREN’T A WASTE ANYMORE! Indian Researchers Develop Bone Implants from Eggshells

As one might just carry on with their day, making an omelette and obviously dumping those egg shells, but what we might see as waste is apparently being seen as a potential material for bone implants. Yes you heard it right, eggshells!

In this article, we are going to cover exactly that!

Background

There are often cases leading up to poor substitutes used for bone implants, sometimes either being from the donor or patient themselves. Modern medicine makes use of materials that contain artificial calcium such as Plaster of Paris and lately, phosphate compounds consisting that of hydroxypatite and calcium phosphate.

Researchers of Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Hyderabad, and Dr B R Ambedkar National Institute of Technology (NIT), Jalandhar, have developed a process by which bone implant materials can be synthesised from waste egg shells. The research tends to produce bone substitute materials such as tricalcium phosphate, a commonly used bone substitute material, from natural sources. 95.1% of eggshells consists that of minerals along with small amounts of proteins and water.

Advantages

Eggshells are a great substitute as they are a natural source, cheap, bio compatible and can be found in abundance, thus a check on the economical aspect. Experts say that there has always been some hesitancy in the conventional method of using synthetic chemicals as bone replacement materials, as the chemical residues present can prove toxic, if not eliminated properly.

Ball Milling Process

The researchers synthesised pure and thermally stable -TCP nano powder from egg shells.They used a milling process called ball milling to produce these activated calcium phosphate powders. Their results show that egg shell wastes are promising enough to replace commercially available -TCP produced using harmful nitrate precursors and has the capability to develop implantable bio-material for tissue regeneration.

What can we expect?

With its efficiency still at test, only time will tell as to how this reliable technology will be put to its full proof implementation. This can prove to be a big step in the field of Bio-medical and on a larger perspective, count in as one of the technological advancements for India that hopefully turns out to be promising. 

Hello. I am Sakshi More. I am currently pursuing my degree in Computer Engineering from Rajiv Gandhi University of Technology. I have always loved writing and expressing my thoughts and would like to extend my horizon with respect to the topics I choose to write upon.

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