New University research is being developed to grow back bones — and it’s not magic from a fantasy novel.
Bone scaffolds, which provide a base for stem cells to produce new bone, currently cost thousands of dollars for a single gram, making them difficult and nearly impossible for average people to buy.
But James Hollier, biological engineering senior, is conducting research to create bone scaffolds that are cheaper but still compatible with the body.
To make the scaffolds, Hollier first makes a solution of organic materials, such as collagen or cellulose, and then freezes it vertically. The porous scaffold is created by this freeze-drying because the water in the solution is removed.
This is a preview of Research for Developing Cost Effective Bones going on.
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Micro-fabrication of Silk-based Scaffold Materials for Tissue Engineering: Formulation Design, Processing Control and Stem Cell Differentiation
Applications are invited for a Ph.D studentship in School of Chemical Engineering and Analytical Science (http://www.ceas.manchester.ac.uk/), and Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (http://www.mib.ac.uk/), University of Manchester.
Silk produced by the domesticated silkworm, Bombyx mori, is readily available in large quantity and has a long history of use in medicine as sutures. The fibrous proteins exhibit unique mechanical and biological properties, including good biocompatibility, good oxygen and water vapour permeability, biodegradability, and minimal inflammatory reaction. Such distinctive properties, in combination with the possibility of genetic control to tailor sequence, provide an important set of material options for construction of biomaterial and scaffolds for tissue engineering. Recent experimental studies of engineering cartilage tissue using human mesenchymal stem cells (hMST) have demonstrated that silk-based scaffold materials are superior to collagen and synthetic polymer-based scaffold materials.
This is a preview of PhD IN TISSUE ENGINEERING IN UNIVERSITY OF MANCHESTER.
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Chicago: Injecting stem cells into injured mice made their muscles grow back twice as big in a matter of days, creating mighty mice with bulky muscles that stayed big and strong for the rest of their lives, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
If the same applies to humans, the findings could lead to new treatments for diseases that cause muscles to deteriorate, such as muscular dystrophy. It may even help people resist the gradual erosion of muscle strength that comes with age, Bradley Olwin, of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and colleagues reported in the journal Science Translational Medicine.
“This was a very exciting and unexpected result,” Olwin, who worked on the study, said.“We found that the transplanted stem cells are permanently altered and reduce the aging of the transplanted muscle, maintaining strength and mass,” he added.
Olwin’s team experimented on young mice with leg injuries, injecting them with muscle stem cells taken from young donor mice. Stem cells are unique in that they can constantly renew themselves, and form the basis of other specialized cells. These cells not only repaired the injury, but they caused the treated muscle to increase in size by 170%.
Olwin’s team had thought the changes would be temporary, but they lasted through the lifetime of the mice, which was about two years.
Olwin and colleagues said when they injected the cells into a healthy leg, they did not get the same effect, suggesting there is something important about injecting the cells into an injured muscle that triggers growth. REUTERS
