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Engineering to protect brittle bones
June 19, 2002Leeds University engineer Dr Ruth Wilcox, 27, is on a mission - to help people with the brittle bone disease osteoporosis. She has just won a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship from the Royal Academy of Engineering, starting 1 August, which will enable her to devote the next five years of her research to improving treatment of patients with osteoporosis and other painful bone disorders.
Ruth's main focus is to optimise a technique called percutaneous vertebroplasty (PVP), which can be used to treat vertebral compression fractures, suffered by many elderly people with osteoporosis. PVP involves injecting special bone cement into the vertebrae of the spine to stabilise them - it is minimally invasive and therefore less traumatic for elderly patients. The procedure has become popular in the US as it is reasonably cheap to perform but is still only rarely used in the UK. It could also potentially be used to treat patients with spinal trauma and pelvic fractures.
"I want to optimise the bone cements that we're using and develop a new range of cements specifically for this technique," says Ruth. "It's very exciting - new hydroxyapatite-forming materials are being developed that actually encourage bone repair. We might even be able to use bone cement to manage tumours by incorporating slow-release drugs into the cement."
"Our School has a global reputation in medical engineering but spinal biomechanics is not an area in which it has traditionally operated," says Professor Philip Gaskell, Head of Leeds University's School of Mechanical Engineering. "It is to Ruth's credit, and with her energy, that this field has developed into one of growing national and international significance."
Ruth's interest in engineering started with a Year in Industry placement at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, followed by a Masters degree in engineering science from Oxford University. She studied for her PhD in burst fracture biomechanics at Leeds University, during which she won several prizes for research and presentation from the Scoliosis Research Society and the British Orthopaedic Research Society.
Royal Academy of Engineering
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