[Editors] MIT tissue scaffold could help heal sports injuries, arthritis

[Elizabeth Thomson]

======================================
MIT: New tissue scaffold regrows cartilage and bone
--Work could help heal sports injuries, arthritis
======================================

For Immediate Release
MONDAY, MAY. 11, 2009

Contact: Elizabeth A. Thomson, MIT News Office
E: thomson at mit.edu, T: 617-258-5402

Photo Available

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--MIT engineers and colleagues have built a new tissue  
scaffold that can stimulate bone and cartilage growth when  
transplanted into the knees and other joints.

The scaffold could offer a potential new treatment for sports injuries  
and other cartilage damage, such as arthritis, says Lorna Gibson, the  
Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering  
and co-leader of the research team with Professor William Bonfield of  
Cambridge University.

“If someone had a damaged region in the cartilage, you could remove  
the cartilage and the bone below it and put our scaffold in the hole,”  
said Gibson. The researchers describe their scaffold in a recent  
series of articles in the Journal of Biomedical Materials Research.

The technology has been licensed to Orthomimetics, a British company  
launched by one of Gibson’s collaborators, Andrew Lynn of Cambridge  
University. The company recently started clinical trials in Europe.

The scaffold has two layers, one that mimics bone and one that mimics  
cartilage. When implanted into a joint, the scaffold can stimulate  
mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow to produce new bone and  
cartilage. The technology is currently limited to small defects, using  
scaffolds roughly 8 mm in diameter.

The researchers demonstrated the scaffold’s effectiveness in a 16-week  
study involving goats. In that study, the scaffold successfully  
stimulated bone and cartilage growth after being implanted in the  
goats’ knees.

The project, a collaboration enabled by the Cambridge-MIT Institute,  
began when the team decided to build a scaffold for bone growth. They  
started with an existing method to produce a skin scaffold, made of  
collagen (from bovine tendon) and glycosaminoglycan, a long  
polysaccharide chain. To mimic the structure of bone, they developed a  
technique to mineralize the collagen scaffold by adding sources of  
calcium and phosphate.

Once that was done, the team decided to try to create a two-layer  
scaffold to regenerate both bone and cartilage (known as an  
osteochondral scaffold). Their method produces two layers with a  
gradual transition between the bone and cartilage layers.

“We tried to design it so it’s similar to the transition in the body.  
That’s one of the unique things about it,” said Gibson.

There are currently a few different ways to treat cartilage injuries,  
including stimulating the bone marrow to release stem cells by  
drilling a hole through the cartilage into the bone; transplanting  
cartilage and the underlying bone from another, less highly loaded  
part of the joint; or removing cartilage cells from the body,  
stimulating them to grow in the lab and re-implanting them.

The new scaffold could offer a more effective, less expensive, easier  
and less painful substitute for those therapies, said Gibson.

MIT collaborators on the project are Professor Ioannis Yannas, of  
mechanical engineering and biological engineering; Myron Spector of  
the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology (HST);  
Biraja Kanungo, a graduate student in materials science and  
engineering; recent MIT PhD recipients Brendan Harley (now at the  
University of Illinois) and Scott Vickers; and Zachary Wissner-Gross,  
a graduate student in HST. Dr. Hu-Ping Hsu of Harvard Medical School  
also worked on the project.

Cambridge University researchers involved in the project are Professor  
William Bonfield, Andrew Lynn, now CEO of Orthomimetics, Dr. Neil  
Rushton, Serena Best and Ruth Cameron.

The research was funded by the Cambridge-MIT Institute, the Whitaker- 
MIT Health Science Fund, Universities UK, Cambridge Commonwealth Trust  
and St. John’s College Cambridge.

--END--

Written by Anne Trafton, MIT News Office
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/editors/attachments/20090511/c46cdb25/attachment.htm