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Bioengineer Jeffrey Karp is used to finding inspiration in unusual places. He’s looked to porcupines’ barbed quills and the sticky pads of geckos’ feet, for example, to develop medical adhesives. And one afternoon a few years ago he sat in his office with some of his lab members Googling parasites.
Karp, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was hoping to create a new medical adhesive for wet soft tissues, such as the gut’s lining or the exposed flesh of burn victims. “There’s been very minimal innovation in the clinic in terms of adhesives in the past several decades,” he says.
He and his team reasoned that they could model this new adhesive on the tricks of a parasite that ...
