Nut waste transforms into the next generation of medical marvel

Graduate students at the University of Chicago have discovered that the humble nuts used in herbal teas have revolutionized medical devices and that most people can throw away as powerful tools for health care. the study, It’s published today in Materialsshows how Malva Nut Tea’s gelatinous leftovers can be designed into advanced materials for everything from wound healing to heart monitoring.

Malva nuts, known in Chinese medicine as panda high, have an extraordinary ability to expand in the water. While most people throw away the resulting jelly after drinking tea, doctoral student Changxu Sun saw an undeveloped possibility.

“You’ve never seen fruit expand from a tree with that kind of volume,” said Sun, who led the study at the University of Chicago’s School of Molecular Engineering. “It originally is an oval shape, one centimeter wide. When immersed in water, it expands its volume about eight times and 20 times by weight, turning it into a gelatinous mass, like a jelly.”

This prominent expansion is far beyond other natural ingredients – rice only expands three times when cooked, but even chia seeds only manage their original weight by 10 times. The researchers have transformed this natural phenomenon into sophisticated hydrogels. It is a water-based material that mimics human tissue and can be used in a variety of medical applications.

Professor Bozitian of the Chicago University of Chemistry, who oversaw the research, praised Sun’s innovative ideas. “This is an incredible discovery from a notable student. Changxu saw herbal tea and was ready to build a world of sustainable biomedical applications.”

The team developed a process that extracts useful components from the nuts, removes hard outer shell material, and creates a pure lyophilized scaffold that returns to life when water is added. In tests, the resulting hydrogels performed better than commercial products in several medical applications, particularly in recording cardiac signals via ECG patches.

“We found that we showed superior performance and quality compared to commercial ECG patches. We also applied it to tissue surfaces in vivo, showing a great record of biosignals,” Sun said. I’ve explained it. “We wanted to show that people should shift their attention to unexplored real estate and unexplored natural plants resources.”

This finding could have particular implications in Southeast Asian countries where Malva trees are native. Sun believes these countries could develop valuable medical resources from local materials, providing both medical solutions and economic opportunities.

“They are low-income countries, and their health care systems are constantly limited by this lack of resources,” Sun pointed out. “Here we have local native materials that can be used to create valuable healthcare solutions while providing some economic stability to these poor areas.”

The researchers’ methods focus on sustainability to convert nut waste into medical grade materials using minimal treatment. The resulting hydrogels show promise in multiple applications, from wound dressings that promote healing to bioelectronic interfaces that can monitor cardiac activity.

This study represents a broader trend in medical research to find sustainable and natural alternatives to synthetic materials. The success at Malva Nuts suggests that other plant-based materials currently considered waste may hold similar possibilities for medical applications.

This finding could lead to more affordable medical devices in areas with traditional medical resources scarcity, while simultaneously creating value from what was previously considered waste. This is an approach that combines environmental sustainability with medical innovation, transforming yesterday’s tea escape into tomorrow’s medical technology.