Cattle hides build human bodies: research
Meat waste can help patch up damaged human tissue, according Waikato University research. And one day it could save lives. Animal skin – high in collagen – can be used to aid cell regeneration, Safia Noorzai, a chemical engineering PhD student at the university has found.
In future, it could repair organs such as kidneys and hearts, Noorzai said.
Noorzai extracts the collagen from bulls hide, turns it into a hydrogel and 3D prints the gel into complex scaffolds.
Scaffolds – currently made from synthetic materials – guide the growth of new tissue such as bone or cartilage.
‘‘If you had to regrow skin or maybe in the future even an organ, you need something, building blocks, something to hold it,’’ Noorzai said.
‘‘The scaffolds will be building blocks for new cell generation.’’
Animal processor Wallace Corporation funds Noorzai’s work and provides her with free bulls hide offcuts.
If the bulls hide pieces aren’t good enough to make leather, they’re usually thrown out.
Noorzai’s work was prompted by her professor, Dr Johan Verbeek, who has used blood meal to make novatein – a type of plastic – now being produced commercially in a Hamilton factory.
Reducing waste is the number one driver behind their work, Noorzai said.
‘‘The whole point of this project was to use waste biological material such as bovine skin to convert this into a high value product.
‘‘We didn’t want to put the skins to waste.’’
Bulls hide is incredibly high in collagen, a valuable substance at about $16 per gram.
Collagen – the second most common substance found in the human body after water – strengthens and stabilises human tissue such as skin, cartilage and bone.
People seem happy to buy a $200 tub of face cream containing collagen, Noorzai said.
But it doesn’t work. ‘‘Unless you inject collagen into your face . . . it will not affect you, it will not change your skin.
‘‘It is really important for people to understand the science of things rather than just blindly buy things like that.
‘‘The good thing about collagen is it’s biodegradable, so, it’s not synthetic.
‘‘If we had to use a synthetic one which they’re using at the moment we [would] have to somehow take it out of the body.
‘‘[With collagen] you don’t have to worry about if your body is going to accept it or the body is going to reject it. It’s already found in the human body so we have that advantage of knowing its internal properties.’’
The animal-waste-derived scaffolds will be ready in the new year.
She hopes the work will extend to kidney reparation and creating heart valves – something being researched in the US.
‘‘There’s a lot of avenues for it, a lot of amazing things that we can do.
But organs have blood vessels, something difficult to manufacture.
‘‘The only problem they have at the moment is with vascularisation.
‘‘We can grow cartilage and things that don’t require vascularisation.’’
‘‘To have blood flow you need blood vessels. How do we put blood vessels into it?
‘‘That will be a whole other PhD.’’