Project number
26006
Organization
Don and Sherry McDonald Biomedical Projects
Offering
ENGR498-F2025-S2026
Introduction:
Cartilage within the knee joint that is damaged in younger patients due to sports injuries and other traumatic events does not heal spontaneously. Cartilage damage leads to pain, decrease mobility and can eventually progress to diffuse cartilage degeneration and osteoarthritis of a joint. There are no current medical or surgical treatments that restore osteoarthritic joints to their native condition and patients will commonly require joint replacement. Due to the limited longevity of arthroplasty and problems inherent in revision procedures this option is not generally offered to younger patients, who often need to limit their activities and live with pain as a result of a cartilage injury. In order to develop new treatments to regenerate damaged cartilage, stem cells have been used to produce cartilage like tissues. To date these engineered tissues have not had the same histological or mechanical properties as native tissues. One approach to improving the quality of tissue engineered cartilage is to apply a load to the engineered tissues while they are developing. The goal of this project is to design and develop a dynamic bioreactor that can be used to produce tissue engineered cartilage exposed to multiple type of controlled mechanical forces. This will allow further testing of methods to improve the quality of engineered tissues via the application of mechanical loading. A previous team has designed a way to apply an axial and shear load to cultures, however, the design did not allow for application of long-term loading in a sterile environment. The system requirements of the current project will include a method to keep tissue cultures sterile, control the environment that tissue are exposed to during loading (i.e. atmospheric gas composition, temperature and humidity), and control loads applied to tissues.
Cartilage within the knee joint that is damaged in younger patients due to sports injuries and other traumatic events does not heal spontaneously. Cartilage damage leads to pain, decrease mobility and can eventually progress to diffuse cartilage degeneration and osteoarthritis of a joint. There are no current medical or surgical treatments that restore osteoarthritic joints to their native condition and patients will commonly require joint replacement. Due to the limited longevity of arthroplasty and problems inherent in revision procedures this option is not generally offered to younger patients, who often need to limit their activities and live with pain as a result of a cartilage injury. In order to develop new treatments to regenerate damaged cartilage, stem cells have been used to produce cartilage like tissues. To date these engineered tissues have not had the same histological or mechanical properties as native tissues. One approach to improving the quality of tissue engineered cartilage is to apply a load to the engineered tissues while they are developing. The goal of this project is to design and develop a dynamic bioreactor that can be used to produce tissue engineered cartilage exposed to multiple type of controlled mechanical forces. This will allow further testing of methods to improve the quality of engineered tissues via the application of mechanical loading. A previous team has designed a way to apply an axial and shear load to cultures, however, the design did not allow for application of long-term loading in a sterile environment. The system requirements of the current project will include a method to keep tissue cultures sterile, control the environment that tissue are exposed to during loading (i.e. atmospheric gas composition, temperature and humidity), and control loads applied to tissues.