In 2009, ADMET celebrated its 20th year in business by giving away, free of charge, a complete biomedical or biomaterials testing machine. Applicants were asked to submit information regarding on going research and explain why they deserved to win the Materials Testing System. ADMET awarded Jeffrey M. Karp, Professor and Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials and Stem Cell Therapeutics at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital/Harvard-MIT Division of Health Science and Technology, Harvard Medical School and his team an ADMET eXpert 7601 1 kN Universal Testing System for Medical Adhesive Materials Testing. The ADMET materials tester was delivered in September-09 and is being used for testing biodegradable tape based medical adhesives according to ASTM D3983-98 Standard Test Method for Measuring Strength and Shear Modulus of Nonrigid Adhesives by the Thick-Adherend Tensile Lap. The committee chose the Karp Lab at MIT because of the importance of the biomedical testing system to the success of the overall project. The key to the success of biodegradable polymer based adhesives and other adhesive mechanisms from nature is being able to test and analyze the tensile strength, toughness, elasticity, plasticity, and brittleness.
Professor Karp and his team were very excited about receiving the ADMET universal testing machine because they now had a system in their lab dedicated to their research. “The ADMET mechanical tester has been critical for our research to study and develop new biodegradable polymers and new biomedical adhesives for a wide range of medical applications”, says Professor Karp. “Specifically, the eXpert 7601 has been a crucial tool for our daily work to characterize the mechanical properties of novel elastic biodegradable biomaterials that we have developed in our group. These new generation of biomaterials have been designed to mimic the behavior of the many soft tissues. We have achieved this by first examining the mechanical properties of target tissues and then by performing tensile and cyclical tests with the synthesized biomaterials. We have determined material properties including Young’s modulus and tensile strengths. The ADMET software has been incredibly useful given its ease of use and given that it performs automatic calculations. In addition to development of materials to mimic soft tissues, we have also been exploring the use of these materials to develop tape based tissue adhesives to seal tissues and prevent leaks following trauma or surgical procedures. Shear testing is useful to mimic potential forces applied to the adhesive from surrounding tissue. To enhance the level of adhesion with specific tissues, we are exploring the parameter space for nano- and micro-topography on the surface of the adhesives. Given the wide range of material properties we have achieved, we utilize both 50 and 1000N load cells that can quickly and easily be changed and which show excellent accuracy and sensitivity. eXpert 7601 grips enable use to handle a multitude of samples with different shapes and sizes. ADMET customer service responds rapidly to our questions and was extremely helpful during the training period. The eXpert 7601 mechanical tester has been extremely useful to measure mechanical properties of both materials and tissues and has been an instrumental component of our research” (Jeff Karp)
Jeff Karp–Assistant Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School, Director of the Laboratory for Advanced Biomaterials and Stem Cell-Based Therapeutics, Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Department of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
For more information on the Karp Lab you can visit the Karp Lab. ADMET is always interested in hearing about your testing application. Feel free to contact us anytime @ 800-667-3220 or visit our website for more information.
