Seminar: Vascularized Bone Grafts for Craniofacial Regeneration

sep5Biomedical Engineering Graduate Seminar: Warren Grayson, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University; Friday, September 5 – 138 Fisher at 10:00 a.m.

Title: Vascularized Bone Grafts for Craniofacial Regeneration

The treatment of large bone loss due to congenital defects, trauma or cancer resection remains a huge clini-cal 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 per-sons 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 de-fects. 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.

This seminar is partially funded by the Visiting Women & Minority Lecturer/Scholar Series which is funded by the President’s Office and a grant to the Office of Institutional equity from the State of Michigan’s King-Chavez-Parks Initiative