How to Rebuild Bone Tissue
February 18, 2022
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Posted by admin
The rapidly advancing field of bone tissue engineering is focused on growing bone cells in the lab on materials called scaffolds, then transferring these structures into a person’s body to repair bone damage. Like the bone it mimics, scaffolds need an interconnected network of small and large pores that allow cells and nutrients to spread and help generate new bone tissue.
The McGill team’s promising process works by modifying the internal structure of a material, called graphene oxide, to make it more conducive to regenerating bone tissue. Graphene oxide is an ultrathin, extra strong compound that is being used increasingly in electronics, optics, chemistry, energy storage, and biology. One of its unique properties is that when stem cells are placed on it, they tend to transform into bone-generating cells called osteoblasts.
The multidisciplinary group—comprising researchers from McGill‘s Departments of Mining and Materials Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Dentistry—found that adding an emulsion of oil and water to the graphene oxide, then freezing it at two different temperatures, yielded two different sizes of pores throughout the material.
Professor Marta Cerruti said that when they “seeded” the now-porous scaffolding with stem cells from mouse bone marrow, the cells multiplied and spread inside the network of pores, a promising sign the new approach could eventually be used to regenerate bone tissue in humans.
“We showed that the scaffolds are completely biocompatible, that the cells are happy when you put them in there, and that they’re able to penetrate all through the scaffold and colonize the whole scaffold,” she stated.
Source: https://phys.org/
Categories: Uncategorized
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Tags: bone marrow, bone tissue, bone-generating cells, graphene oxide, McGill, osteoblasts, pores, scaffolds, stem cells
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