Molecular Tag Ensures Implant Traceability

A team of researchers from the CNRS, Aix-Marseille University and Paris 13 University has just shown the effectiveness of molecular labeling to unequivocally identify the origin of biomedical implants, even after a prolonged period of time. a living organism. These results are published in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition on July 5, 2018.

The identification and traceability of biomedical implants is a very important topic. Sanitary scandals on medical devices have shown the need for patients to be able to trace the origin of adulterated implants responsible for clinical complications. However, if the packaging is not preserved, it is quite difficult to authenticate an implant, especially if it has remained in an organism for several years. 

In this context, teams from the Charles Sadron Institute of the CNRS, the Translational Vascular Research Laboratory (Paris 13 University / Inserm / Paris Diderot University) and the Institute of Radical Chemistry (CNRS / Aix-Marseille University) come from develop an innovative solution allowing

For this, the researchers used polymers, large molecules composed of two basic types of subunits whose sequence constitutes a code, like the sequences of 0 and 1 in computer science. By determining the mass of each fragment of the polymer by a chemical analysis method called mass spectrometry, it is possible to go back to the code of the molecule, and thus to decrypt it in the manner of a barcode. 

Molecular tags were incorporated in very small amounts into model implants, which were implanted into rats. After three months, the implants were extracted from the animals and mass spectrometric analysis then showed that the identification polymers can be decoded unambiguously.

These results represent a major breakthrough in the fight against counterfeiting and the traceability of materials for health. Since mass spectrometry is already used in hospitals and in many analytical laboratories, this method of identification could easily be extended to other areas.

This article has been republished from materials provided by CNRS. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

Reference
Denise Karamessini, Teresa Simon-Yarza, Salomé Poyer, Evgeniia Konishcheva, Laurence Charles, Didier Letourneur, Jean-Francois Lutz. Abiotic sequence-coded oligomers as efficient in vivo taggants for identification of implanted materials. Angewandte Chemie International Edition, 2018; DOI: 10.1002/anie.201804895.