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To some people, they are the stuff of nightmares, not to scientists in the U.K.

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Spiders could be at the forefront of a medical revolution.

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They've created an implant for mending injured knee joints using silk, and hope they can go on to treat a range of other ailments, too.

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For tonight's Make, Create, Innovate, Nick Glass has been to Oxford in England to see for himself.

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A lot of us don't like them very much. Arachnophobia it's called -- fear of spiders.

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Yet spider's silk is both beautiful and extraordinarily strong.

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Only now are scientists learning how to use it to mimic nature for our medical benefit.

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So we've invented an implant called FibroFix, which goes in people's knees.

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It's made out of silk and it gives them the function of their knee back, but it also encourages the regeneration of cartilage tissue.

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After joining a group studying spider silk at Oxford University in the U.K.,

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Dr. Nick Skaer soon realized their potential.

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Spider silk is 25 times as tough as high-tensile steel, and it manufactures that at room temperature, room pressure, out of protein.

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And that makes it one of nature's finest bioengineers.

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Despite these extraordinary properties, spiders only produce tiny amounts of silk.

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The challenge was to find a way to produce high-quality volumes of the stuff.

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So he turned to a different insect.

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The silk factories are silkworm, and they've been farmed for more than 5,000 years.

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Each one of these can produce a couple of grams of silk, a thousand times more than a spider can.

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But as silkworm is only a fifth as strong as spider silk, Skaer had to find a way to strengthen the fiber.

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The eureka moment was understanding that we could take silkworm silk and break it down into the individual silk molecules,

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build it back into structures that capture the properties of spider silk.

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So there it was, the silkworm productivity combined with spider silk strength. FibroFix was born.

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So, what we turn our liquid into is one of these.

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This is an implant which is designed to go into the knee to repair the cartilage when it's damaged.

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A key aspect of any implant is durability.

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I'm gonna hang this five-kilo weight off the bottom of it.

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We could probably put another five kilos on the bottom of this and it wouldn't deflect but the pins would break.

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It's probably at least ten times stronger than the options that are out there at the moment, certainly.

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According to a recent study from Sweden, knee replacement surgery costs the U.S. health market an estimated $13 billion a year.

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The same study predicts a 600-percent increase in the need for this kind of surgery by 2030.

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With Skaer's product entering clinical trials now, this could help those knees self-heal and remove the need for a replacement.

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Skaer is hopeful his technology could be used to fix other parts of the body --

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shoulder and hip joints, the spine and even the heart, all using animal silk technology.

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Insects were my passion. I used to turn over rocks and look under rocks and find bugs.

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Of all of the insect world, spiders were about my least favorite.

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Some of us will always be terrified by spiders, but Dr. Nick Skaer has forged a career by unlocking the secrets of their spinning.

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How do you look at spiders now?

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I don't so much see the eight legs crawling around and the sharp pair of fangs.

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I see something that can spin me a remarkable material, and that's very exciting as a scientist.