Prosthetic disc containing therapeutic material

Abstract

By implanting two prosthetic disc capsules side-by-side into a damaged disc of a human spine, both height and motion, including front-to-back bending, can be maintained. Each prosthetic disc capsule has a bladder enclosing a fluid containing a therapeutic material that is slowly diffusible through a semi-permeable membrane of the bladder. The fluid filling the semi-permeable membrane preferably is an aqueous solution that has gel-like properties that afford a viscosity and velocity-shear behavior imitating the natural rheology of intradiscal nuclear tissue. Those properties are obtained when the aqueous solution is of a mucopolysaccharide such as hyaluronic acid or soldium hyaluronate.

Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.