The future of fracture fixing
Issued: Fri, 03 Sep 2010 10:27:00 BST
Two researchers at the University are, not for the first time, combining their respective talents to help push the boundaries of medical science.
Biologist Dr Matt Dalby and engineer Dr Nikolaj Gadegaard have been working on a project to develop a form of orthopaedic implant that can promote bone production from mesenchymal stem cells in the bone marrow.
The pair work at a nanometric scale to graft patterns onto implant materials which stem cells in the bone marrow can then interact with.
"If you have a hip replacement, the doctors put a long metal rod, or stem, down into the bone cavity, into the marrow, with a new femoral head on top," Dr Dalby explains. "This stem interacts with the mesenchymal stem cell supply of the marrow. What actually happens is that you get soft tissue formation, rather than hard tissue formation; this leads to micromotion and eventual failure."
"That is why implants have a certain lifespan and leads to frail patients undergoing complex revision surgery. So what we’re doing is trying to pattern materials to communicate with the cell so we get hard tissue formation, and therefore an implant for life"
This research is already being recognised by the medical community and the hope is that the work could soon be moved out of the lab and translated into medical practice. ‘We are collaborating with consultant surgeon Mr Dominic Meek at the Southern General Hospital, Glasgow and we’re trying to get a lot of crossover between the scientists and the clinicians, so we have a couple of registrars in the lab who work alongside basic scientists to try and help translate this into clinic.’
The pair have a history of successful collaborations. "We have these strange parallel lives," says Dr Dalby. "We both came here as postdoctoral researchers on the same grant, Nikolaj was fabricating and I was a cell biologist, and we’ve just carried on. It’s a collaboration that’s always yielded results."
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