Every year, hundreds of millions of people break bones. Most recover well. But for complex fractures — the kind where bone shatters into many small fragments — conventional treatment means hours of surgery, metal plates, screws, and often a second operation months later just to remove the hardware. It is effective, but it is also slow, invasive, and hard on the body.
A research team at Sir Run Run Shaw Hospital, affiliated with Zhejiang University in Hangzhou, China, may have found a better way. In 2016, a young resident physician named Lin Xianfeng watched experienced surgeons spend hours trying to piece together shattered bones, often with imperfect results. He began looking for an alternative — and found his answer watching oysters.
Oysters cling to bridge pilings and rocky surfaces with extraordinary tenacity, forming a firm bond in cold, salty, constantly moving water — exactly the kind of wet, hostile environment in which conventional adhesives fail. Lin's team reverse-engineered this natural mechanism and developed Bone-02: an injectable adhesive that sets firmly in the body's blood-rich surgical environment within two to three minutes.
The procedure requires only a 2–3 cm incision. The glue bonds fragments with a strength exceeding 180 kilograms of force. Crucially, it is fully biodegradable — the body gradually absorbs it over approximately six months as the bone heals, eliminating the need for follow-up surgery to remove implants.
More than 150 patients have already been treated. In one documented case, a complex wrist fracture — which traditionally would have required a large incision and metal hardware — was resolved through a single small injection. Three months later, full wrist function was restored with no complications. Multicentre randomised trials are now approved and underway. Long-term safety data is still needed, but the early results suggest something orthopaedic surgeons have been seeking for decades: a fast, minimally invasive, body-friendly solution to one of medicine's most common problems.