StemCell Therapy

With its world-renowned biomedical engineering program, School of Medicine and School of Veterinary Medicine, the University of California, Davis, brings a constellation of expertise to bear on the field of bone regeneration and repair.

Here are some of the UC Davis scientists engaged in bone-repair research:

Professor A. Hari Reddi holds the Lawrence Ellison Chair in Orthopedics at UC Davis. He has studied bone regeneration for more than 40 years and joined the faculty at UC Davis in 1997. His laboratory at the National Institutes of Health was the first to purify bone morphogenetic protein in the 1980s. His laboratory is studying the role of bone morphogenetic proteins in tissue engineering and regeneration of articular cartilage, with an eye toward helping patients with osteoarthritis. Although initially thought of in relation to bone, these proteins are now shown to be involved in brain, cartilage, kidney, lung, tooth and nerve differentiation as well as in heat regulation and iron metabolism, Reddi says. He has proposed changing the name to "body morphogenetic proteins" in view of their versatile role in the human body.

"BMPs are one of the most exciting chapters in modern developmental biology," he says.

More information: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/ctrr/research/reddi.html

Understanding the healing and regeneration of cartilage is the aim of the Musculoskeletal Bioengineering Laboratory led by Professor Kyriacos Athanasiou, chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering at UC Davis. Cartilage forms the hard covering at the ends of bones. Tissues such as the knee meniscus have to deal with demanding loads but show little or no ability to regenerate by themselves.

Athanasiou's lab aims to understand the healing processes of cartilage, and to augment those processes through tissue engineering. Their approach uses both biomechanical techniques and bioactive agents and signals. They are also interested in stem cell technologies to repair cartilage and connective tissue.

The team has partnered with surgeons at the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital to regrow jawbones for dogs that have lost part of their jaw due to cancer or injury. The technique uses a sponge-like scaffolding impregnated with bone morphogenetic protein, which is inserted into the space where the bone was removed. The growth-promoting protein stimulates the dogs remaining jawbone to grow new bone cells, eventually filling the entire defect and integrating with the native bone.

More information: http://www.bme.ucdavis.edu/athanasioulab/

Kent Leach, associate professor of biomedical engineering, is working with matrix materials that encourage the growth of new bone from stem cells. With funding from The Hartwell Foundation, he is working on treatments that could be used in babies with craniosynostosis, a condition where the bones of the skull fuse too early. In a project funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, Leach is studying a gel-like matrix that can be seeded with adult stem cells from fat and used to heal bone fractures more rapidly.

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Bone repair research at UC Davis

This entry was posted on August 31, 2012 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Veterinary Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed. |