KELO-TV Sports features SDSU Engineering’s efforts to develop a bio-glue made from the protein mussels use to stick to rocks.
One misstep on the football field can spell disaster, leaving a player sidelined with a knee injury.
“Those are incredibly common among athletes and also in active individuals. So and those injuries take months to heal and often leads to incomplete recovery,” SDSU Assistant Professor Solaiman Tarafder said.
Tarafder’s research team is working to develop a bio-glue to be used in place of suturing a torn meniscus back together.
…“It is pushing the boundaries of regenerative medicine, promising better patient care in the future,” SDSU Dean of Engineering Sanjeev Kumar said.
“How many surgeries, knee replacements, hip replacement and joint replacements we do these days. So this will be really transformative to help all those patients, not just the athletes,” Kumar said.
…“When we do the testing, normally I apply the glue with the tissues tested in the lab. We do some biomechanical tests, biological test, all those things in the lab,” SDSU graduate student Hasan Rafsan said.
Rafsan has a mechanical engineering background, but wanted to be part of this groundbreaking project.
“It will help eventually, and the patients who are struggling now because most, in most cases, people have to go to, meniscus removal, but in this case, they can just have some arthroscopic procedure and apply the glue there and it will help them to remove the pain,” Rafsan said.
Rafsan also makes molds for creating meniscus implants, a project that started six months ago [Travis Fossing, “The Glue That Holds Us Together,” KELO-TV, 2025.10.24].
All three of the expert team members quoted in this story appear to be immigrants, the kind of people South Dakota voters said in last year’s election they don’t want on our team. These immigrants are clearly harming our country, making athletes weaker with their tender scientific interventions. Athletes who wrench their knees on the field should just play through pain and get stitches, like real men did in the good old days!
You know just the other day I awoke from my couch nap the don was on lying about immigrants saying those countries emptied their mental institutions and prisons to run drugs and none of them worked at any job. I was wondering who the Spanish speakers were who put up our new roof in 95 degree heat in two days this summer. They did it perfectly and picked up everything. We hired the best company too, best materials, best white guy talkers. However, the people who actually did the work were Spanish speakers. Reminded me of the meat packing plant I worked at in college in East Sioux City and was 50 years ago. Oh well, I’m sure don the con wouldn’t lie about anything, would he?
South Dakota is home to about 39,900 recent immigrants or about 4.3% of the state’s population and more than 280 refugees resettled in South Dakota so far in July during the fiscal year 2024 compared to 206 in all of 2023.
The extreme white wing in South Dakota is losing it not because nearly half of students qualify for free or reduced lunches and some 3,500 students receive special education support but because new residents in South Dakota are migrants from Muslim countries like Afghanistan, South Sudan and Ethiopia. Nebraska and Iowa are also seeing surges in immigration but Brookings and Moody Counties in South Dakota are homes to more people from Guatemala and other Central American nations.
Just when I was going to applaud SD for a “highly innovative” group in a lower level innovation state I got to Cory’s last paragraph.
It seems that without immigration there’s not enough innovation in SD to water a dog by turning the frisbee upside down.