StemCell Therapy

Aimee Chiavaroli achiavaroli@s-t.com

UMASS DARTMOUTH In her lab in the textiles building, Lamya Karim, assistant professor of bioengineering, showed a reporter a testing system used to break human bone samples.

The goal is to ... test how strong bone is, Karim said.

Karim received the largest National Institute of Health grant to UMass Dartmouth $616,170 to study how Type 2 diabetes weakens bones and increases risk of fractures. Also, this is the first NIH Mentored Research Scientist Career Development Award to a principal investigator at the university, officials said.

According to a news release from UMass Dartmouth, people with Type 2 diabetes are about three times as likely to break a bone than those without it, including fractures with high mortality rates such as hip fractures.

People who have diabetes actually break their bones very often, Karim said, which can be problematic, especially for older people.

Your body isnt as capable of constantly repairing the skeletal system, when it gets older versus when it was younger, she explained.

She noted people often dont know they have weak bones until they break a bone and about a quarter of people who get hip fractures die within a year due to complications.

Type 2 diabetes adds up to $245 billion in annual health care costs in the United States. Diabetes rates in the U.S. are predicted to increase up to five times by the year 2050.

About 18 percent of adults over 65 have Type 2 diabetes in Massachusetts, and about 50 percent are pre-diabetic. Bristol County has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the state, according to the news release.

The bone samples Karim is using will come from cadaver banks or from patients who are getting surgery.

In graduate school at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, Karim worked mainly in bone mechanics and had an interest in molecular properties in bone.

Trying to get the grant was a process in the making, the professor said. Karim wrote the submission for the grant with the help of Mary Bouxsein, a mentor when Karim was a post-doctorate fellow at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston.

She will continue to be a mentor on this project, she said.

Karim, 32, started brainstorming for the project around 2013 and went through two rounds or submissions on the grant, getting feedback on how to improve. She resubmitted it about a year ago, before she began teaching at UMass Dartmouth in September.

Student to senior investigator, everyone has a role in the project, Karim said. The bulk of it will be here at UMass.

Karims goal is to find out the underlying causes of diabetic skeletal fragility.

Itll answer a small part, Karim said about the project. There could be more questions, but Karim said she thinks thats a natural part of research.

I think for a researcher its exciting to have more unanswered questions, she said I enjoy trying to explore the unknown and figure out why things are happening the way they are.

Follow Aimee Chiavaroli on Twitter@AimeeC_SCT.

More:
Cutting (research) to the bone: UMD prof to study diabetes-related skeletal fragility - SouthCoastToday.com

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