Traveling the Long Road to Clinical Translation of Tissue Engineered Bone Grafts

Treating large craniofacial bone loss due to congenital defects, trauma, or cancer resection remains a huge clinical challenge. Approximately 200,000 fractures require bone transplantation annually in the US at the cost of $2B. Tissue engineering, where the patient’s own cells are combined with porous scaffolds to guide their development into new bone tissue, provides a viable means of obtaining ‘autologous’ bone grafts for the treatment of large bone defects. Successfully applying tissue-engineered grafts, however, requires overcoming key scientific, regulatory, and practical hurdles. To address these, Warren Grayson’s lab has focused on the development of a point-of-care stem cell-biomaterial based strategy for treating massive craniomaxillofacial bone loss.

In his talk, Warren Grayson will outline novel technologies and strategies they are developing to advance the bone tissue engineering field with consideration for the regulatory and practical concerns. He will also describe ongoing studies intended to move us closer to realizing human clinical trials.

Learning Goals:

1.    Bone tissue engineering strategies.
2.    Differentiation potential of adipose-derived stem/stromal cells.
3.    Promise and limitations of 3D-printing strategies.
4.    Pre-clinical animal models of bone regeneration.

The Summer Seminar Series is co-sponsored by INBT and the Physical Sciences-Oncology Center.