A modified hot glue gun can mend broken bones
A biodegradable glue that encourages bones to repair themselves can be applied during surgery using a hot glue gun, potentially offering a cheap and quick way to treat injuries
By Matthew Sparkes
5 September 2025
Broken bones often need a material to fill the void
Sopone Nawoot/Alamy
With slight modifications, hot glue guns commonly used in arts and crafts can repair damaged bones quickly and cheaply, researchers say.
Bones can repair themselves after small injuries, but if there is a void – because of serious trauma or tumour removal, for example – then that space needs to be filled with either a graft or an artificial plug made of a material that encourages bone cells to spread.
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One solution is to use 3D printers to create perfectly-fitting scaffolds to fill such voids, but this requires scanning and remote fabrication – a process taking at least a week. That is fine for a pre-planned operation to fix a worn-out joint, for example, but not for emergency trauma surgery.
To solve this problem, Jung Seung Lee at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea and his colleagues have developed a system that can be applied instantly during a single surgery.
They modified a hot glue gun by reducing the temperature at which it operates from over 100°C to around 60°C. They also concocted a material that acts as a biological glue – a mixture of hydroxyapatite, which makes up 50 per cent of the volume of normal human bones, and a biodegradable thermoplastic called polycaprolactone.
