Regenerative medicine holds the key to tissue repair
With the ability to repair, regenerate and restore musculoskeletal organs or tissues, regenerative medicine allows the growth of multiple tissues that build functional organ systems to assimilate with the body.
Helen H.Lu, Director of Columbia’s Biomaterials and Interface Tissue Engineering Laboratory, is currently developing new ways to help the body heal after soft tissue injuries. Collaborating with physicians at Columbia and New York’s Hospital for Special Surgery, Dr Lu and her team have developed a novel scaffolding method to help those with anterior cruciate ligament injuries grow three different tissue types within a single tissue-engineered interface screw.
“Our approach is novel because it focuses on the regeneration as well as functional integration of the soft tissue graft, post repair or reconstruction,” said Dr Lu. This means that once the grafts are placed inside the individual’s body, they can easily combine with connective tissues.
Similarly, in a process that combines synthetic scaffolding with gene delivery techniques, researchers at Duke University have discovered a system that allows them to genetically alter stem cells to stimulate growth as if the growth factors were introduced in the laboratory.
Traditionally, a major limitation with regenerative medicine has been the difficulty in delivering growth factors to the stem cells once they are placed within the body. As there is a limited amount of growth factors that can be placed within the scaffolding, a method was needed for long term delivery.
Farshid Guilak, Director of Orthopedic Research at Duke University Medical Center, has spent years developing biodegradable synthetic scaffolding that mimics the mechanical properties of cartilage.
Where this process typically requires a lengthy process, Guilak employed a technique pioneered by one of his colleagues Charles Gersbach, Assistant Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Gene Therapy expert. Gersbach’s technique uses a method of biomaterial-mediated gene delivery to induce stem cells to produce growth factor proteins.
The results of this process prove that the technique works, and that the resulting material is as good as biomechanically constructed growth factors in the laboratory.
“One of the advantages of our method is getting rid of the growth factor delivery, which is expensive and unstable, and replacing it with scaffolding functionalised with the viral gene carrier,” said Gersbach. “The virus-laden scaffolding could be mass produced and just sitting in a clinic ready to go. We hope this gets us one step closer to a translatable product,” he said.
Although the main focus of this study is on cartilage regeneration, the technique pioneered by Gersbach could easily be applied to many types of orthopaedic tissues such as tendons, ligaments and bones. Where the platform is usable with any type of stem cell, it also proves to be a promising step toward a commercial product.
References:
http://newsroom.cumc.columbia.edu/blog/2014/12/30/tissue-regeneration-orthopedic-repair/
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140218185104.htm
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3875778/
