By Zhao Yongjin

On 2nd April, at the exhibition hall of Xinyuan Cocoon Silk Group Co., Ltd., Chu Chengping, the chairman of the board of the group, took out a screw of about 4 cm long gently from the showcase. What’s special is that the raw material for the screw is not steel, but silk. Its scientific name is ‘biological hollow bone screw’. Chu Chengping called it ‘silk protein bone screw’. This type of screw can be absorbed naturally by human bodies. Fractured patients do not need to take secondary surgeries after using it.

The achievement was researched and developed independently by Xinyuan group and Shanghai Institute of Micro-system and Information Technology of Chinese Academy of Sciences. It is the first in the world. It has advantages including degradable, excellent biocompatibility, and high mechanical performances. It can be applied in many biological and medical scenes such as orthopaedics and plastic surgeries. On 25th December 2023, the product entered a large-scale registered clinical trial in Xi’an.