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>> A cat from Jersey has been given a new lease of life
after vets carried out a pioneering operation
to give him a pair of prosthetic limbs.
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>> The whole process has made me sort
of re-evaluate how well I could manage before and now
and it has been just a profoundly
life-changing experience.
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>> My name is Gordon Blunn and I am Professor
of Bioengineering at UCL.
What we have done is we have tried
to attach the external prosthesis, the artificial arm
or leg, to the skeleton and that has obvious advantages:
it sort of transmits the load through bone,
which is the natural way of transmitting load in the body,
and it sort of alleviates the rubbing
of the soft tissues in the stump.
You don't need a socket for example.
This is a lady that had her arm blown off in the London bombings
and we inserted an ITAP device, and this is her
with the projection out through the skin,
which you see is fairly stable after two years and you can see
that this is an artificial arm.
With the ITAP device, the part of the implant that's stuck
into the bone projects through the skin and the crucial part is
that you have to provide an infectionÐfree seal.
So you don't want bacteria getting along the skin interface
and causing an infection.
>> It always occurred to me that if you could attach a leg
without having to have the socket,
then you overcome the major disadvantages
of conventional prosthetics.
It was limited by the fact that the socket was very rigid
and if I walked too far, I'd get sore bits
where the socket rubbed on me.
It was also very difficult to wear
in the heat 'cause I would sweat and then the suction would break
down and the leg tended to fall off occasionally.
There's the implant, which feels really warm 'cause
it sort of conducts the heat out of me. It just slides on;
do up the end bolt; remember to switch it on.
And there, it's good to go.
>> We had a research programme associated with ITAP here
and we started to translate that research work into human beings
for finger replacements for patients
that had an amputated finger.
We then had connections
with Noel Fitzpatrick who then started
to use ITAP in dogs and in cats.
>> Until this time, the technology to bond skin
to metal was very, very difficult to imagine;
now I would say we've pretty much conquered the technique
of doing that and it provides reliable results.
>> Oscar was a cat who had his back feet removed in a combine
and I think that without ITAP,
the cat would have had to be put down.
>> Roly, come on.
>> I first realised something was wrong with him
when he was lifting his left hind leg
up as we were walking along.
Although he didn't seem to be in any pain, he was holding it up;
I knew there was something wrong.
My vet did x-rays initially, but they didn't show up anything,
so he was referred to Noel who did CT scans
and MRI scans which showed up the osteosarcoma in the top
of the femur and the hip.
>> Seems to be doing well, Dennis. >> Very well Noel, thanks, yeah.
>> He had to have his femur largely resected,
so the upper part of his thigh bone was cut
out completely because of cancer.
What's unique about Roly's procedure is
that he's the first dog in the world that we know
of that's had tendons reattached to a metal bone.
>> One of the ways that bones and joints move of course is
through attachment of muscles via the tendons,
and in an artificial piece of metal, it's very difficult
to reattach those muscles and tendons and it seems
to have worked in Roly's case.
The proximal femural replacement has been used extensively
in humans to treat osteosarcoma, bone cancer essentially,
but what we have never done is used porous metal
to reattach the tendons onto the implant,
which is what we've done with Roly, and that's
why Roly's operation was quite pioneering. So in patients
that have a proximal femural or a trans-radial amputation,
you still have residual nerves and what we want to do
in the future is to couple up electrodes
with those nerves internally and transmit those signals
through a hard wire out to an artificial prosthesis,
and in theory you would be able
to control an artificial hand using a thought process
in the brain.
>> Are you talking about bionic limbs, as it were?
>> We're talking about bionic limbs, yeah.
And I think it's -- it may be, you know, a few years away,
but I think it is doable.
>> Roly was walking again within a couple of days.
His recovery then was over the next six months.
>> Roly has an excellent life, runs around very happily
and would not be here if it wasn't for that technology,
so I would say to people who say, well,
why should you use that technology?, well look him
in the eye and you tell Dennis, his owner,
to put him to sleep because that wasn't necessary
and Gordon's research made this possible.
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>> He's getting more treats and more fun out of life
because he has only, in theory,
maybe he only has another six months to go, so his quality
of life now is much better.
We do more now than we did before because I'm trying
to cram in what we would maybe be doing over three
or four years into the next six months.
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