Event
Bioengineering Seminar Series: Warren L. Grayson
Friday, November 8, 2013
9:00 a.m.-10:00 a.m.
Pepco Room, Jeong H. Kim Engineering Building
Professor John Fisher
jpfisher@umd.edu
Vascularized Bone Grafts for Craniofacial Regeneration
Warren L. Grayson
Assistant Professor
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Institute for NanoBioTechnology
Johns Hopkins University
The treatment of large bone loss due to congenital defects, trauma or cancer resection remains a huge clinical challenge. There are approximately one million fractures requiring bone transplantation annually in the US and it is predicted that within the next 10 years this number will significantly increase, particularly in persons over 50 years of age. Tissue engineering provides a viable means of obtaining autologous bone grafts for the treatment of large bone defects. Successful application of tissue-engineered grafts however requires that we can couple the formation of de novo vasculature in tandem with new bone growth. Our lab has investigated methods for cultivating anatomically-shaped bone grafts in bioreactors and pre-vascularizing these grafts via co-culture techniques. More recent studies have examined the use of adipose-derived stem cells (ASCs) to engineer vascularized bone grafts that can be used to repair craniofacial defects. We have found that heterotypic interaction among endothelial and non-endothelial sub-populations mediate by growth factor effects can choreograph the formation of complex tissue grafts. These findings suggest the tremendous potential for using ASCs in concert with engineering techniques to provide clinically relevant vascularized bone grafts for the repair and regeneration of craniofacial bone loss.
