Acceleration of Bone Fracture Repair

Approximately 7 million people will break a bone this year in the U.S and between 300,000 and 700,000 of these will heal exceptionally slowly or not at all. Motivated by a need to improve the rate and quality of bone fracture repair, we have developed several bone fracture-targeted anabolic drugs that accumulate selectively on any fracture surface and greatly accelerate the return to normal bone density and mechanical strength.

Because these novel technologies deliver the bone healing agents specifically to the fracture surface, avoiding uptake by healthy bones and other tissues, they can be systemically administered without altering any healthy bones or causing toxicity to normal organs. Moreover, their abilities to reduce fracture healing times in half while creating a healed bone that is much stronger than the prefractured bone suggest that they might find a diversity of applications. Indeed, most of the possible indications below have been demonstrated in animal models:

1. treating common long and flat bone fractures,
2. improving recovery from potentially lethal hip fractures
3. accelerating repair of stress fractures,
4. facilitating spinal fusion surgeries,
5. enhancing recovery from open surgeries that require cutting bones,
6. accelerating integration of orthopedic and dental implants into healthy bone,
7. reversing osteoporosis,
8. suppressing expansion of bone metastases, and
9. facilitating craniofacial reconstruction surgeries, etc.