Although nerve growth may have the glamour, one of the main obstacles to creating artificial limbs implanted in the body is the risk of germs invading the implant site.

"If you think of your femur now, there's a lot of torque that takes place as you move around. There's movement of soft tissue that isn't perhaps completely in phase with movement of the femur," says Dr. McGimpsey. "If you twist skin around the wrist, the skin twists, the bone doesn't."

For an amputee, twisting the soft tissue could pull it away from the post, causing infection, further scarring or injury.

To combat that, Dr. McGimpsey and the other researchers are hoping to get bones to fuse with, say, titanium implants, and then somehow promote skin tissue to grow over the insertion site to act as a natural sealant, keeping out germs.

Infection-fighting is so critical, Dr. McGimpsey says, because these devices are expected to last at least half a century. And that's because they're being developed, in part, to help one of the 600 or so soldiers that The Given Limb Foundation, a charity, estimates are returning from Iraq as amputees.

"This is DoD funded work, and we're looking at helping the amputee soldier. These soldiers are in their twenties, they're healthy, they're going to be around for a long time. We need an implant strategy that guarantees there's no infection for 50, 60 years. That's a problem, especially with short residual limb amputation, as there's not a lot of bone to connect an implant to. If they get infected, you have to remove the implant, and you usually have to take bone with it. This is a one-shot strategy," Dr. McGimpsey says.

NOT THE FIRST TIME

While the grant money from Congress is helping research that could one day outfit young soldiers with new limbs, this isn't the first time the CNB, founded in 2006, got federal help. In 2007, Congress earmarked $1 million for the center. "That was through the support of Ted Kennedy, whose son is an amputee, so he had a very personal interest, as well as a national interest, in amputees," says Dr. McGimpsey.

The current grant's advocates were Senators John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Paul G. Kirk, Jr. (D-Mass.) and Rep. James P. McGovern (D-Mass.). The allocation is managed by the Army's Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Resource Center (TATRC).

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