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Research Matters

Working to Address Bone Disease & Injury

 
 

Various diseases and injuries can cause our bones to fracture, and in many cases these fractures do not repair or cause severe pain and immobility. Tissue engineering strategies can exploit the capacity for biological cells to produce new tissues in the laboratory under conditions that aim to recreate the body’s biochemical and physical environment. Such strategies have been successful for regenerating skin and cartilage tissue as clinical treatments, but approaches for recreating bone are not yet successful. A particular limitation is that biologists have come nowhere near being able to grow new bone because they can’t get the cells to make strong bone tissue – it’s jelly-like and you wouldn’t be able to stand on it. Therefore new bone tissue regeneration approaches are needed to develop clinical treatments.

Dr Laoise McNamara, a Lecturer in Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering and Informatics, has secured €1.5 million in funding from the European Research Council to examine how mechanical forces, like stretching and pulling on cells, can affect our bones.

One of the major barriers to advances in the field has been that engineers and biologists have worked separately with little interdisciplinary interaction. Answering these questions lies at the interface between engineering and biology and a major breakthrough in the field now requires a transdisciplinary approach. Dr. McNamara’s research group seeks to break through existing barriers by combining engineering mechanics with biology through a number of innovative approaches to understand the complex mechanical environment in which bone cells live and to characterise the response of bone cells to mechanical loading in healthy bones and during diseases such as osteoporosis.

Dr. McNamara says “We need to load our bones; we need to walk around, to climb stairs in order to keep bone healthy. So we are looking to understand how exactly the cells monitor what sort of loads we are applying; how much we are walking and how heavy the weights are that we are lifting. Our understanding should give us an idea about what loading regimes should be appropriate at different stages during life and especially at the onset of osteoporosis – you could advise a patient of a strategy of exercise and loading, that could minimise bone loss. By understanding which cells are most appropriate, and what mechanical loads we put on the cell, we want to try and develop a method to grow new bone in the lab.”

Author: Dr. Laoise McNamara, Biomedical Engineering

 

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