Absorbable Biomaterials for Medical Devices: A Redesign of Endoscopic Rivets for Biological Tissue

The development of absorbable medical implants is a sophisticated process. It requires an early definition of mechanical, technical and medical restrictions to choose suitable biomaterials. This paper is attempting to present a novel concept for systematically redesigning absorbable implants for wound closure. The described procedure will be used for developing completely absorbable rivets to join the edges of wounds in the gastrointestinal tract together. Each rivet consists of a short term and a long term absorbing part. The aim is to use absorbable biomaterials to avoid a second intervention and to reduce long term side effects of medical implants. In this paper the required multidisciplinary constrains for the rivets are defined. The first steps for specifying material properties due to the device functionality are presented. An in vitro experiment for testing degradation behavior of selected materials led to first promising preliminary results. Further tests will be required to evaluate the implant performance.