EAPSI: Fabrication of Clinically Engineered Scaffolds for Bone Defects using a Large Animal Model

Somo Sami I, Des Plaines IL

Investigators

Abstract

The current clinical treatment of bone defects resulting from trauma, congenital defects, or cancer is hindered by donor site morbidity, risk of infection, poor cosmetic and functional outcomes, and limited available tissue. Engineered bone has the potential for providing treatment for bone defects without severe side effects. This award supports a research collaboration with Dr. Ming-Huei Cheng at Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Taoyuan, Taipei to fabricate engineered bone for defects using a large animal model. The bone will be grown within a biomaterial to allow potential transplantation into patients. This will allow for treatment of bone defects without the need of autologous tissue. Tissue engineering research is primarily focused on growth of tissue to repair or replace damaged or disease tissues and organs. Bone tissue engineering has gained significant attention due to the need for reconstruction of large bone volume defects. The current clinical treatment is reconstruction with autologous tissue, which has seen some success, however, is not without limitations. Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine often focus on biomaterial based strategies to promote vascularized tissue formation. One of the reasons why researchers are unable to grow clinically sized tissue volumes is the inability to sufficiently vascularized human sized scaffolds. Bone formation and vascularization is a dynamic, coordinated processes. Strategies that consider both processes have a greater chance of clinical success. Research has shown using hydrogel based scaffolds seeded with mesenchymal stem cells will improve tissue invasion that will lead to formation of osteogenic tissue. The goal of this proposal is to combine a hydrogel based scaffolds, with optimized pro-vascularization properties, with MSCSs to investigate bone formation in a pig rib-bone defect model. This award under the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes program supports summer research by a U.S. graduate student and is jointly funded by NSF and the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan.