Bioengineering Research Partnership

Investigators
Accomplishments
Outcomes
Activities

 

Regenerative Scaffold Technologies for CNS and Diabetes
Bioengineering Research Partnership
Principal Investigator: Samuel I. Stupp

Sponsored by the National Institutes of Health
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and BioEngineering

Regenerative medicine is an exciting interdisciplinary field full of challenges requiring collaboration among clinicians and technologists to translate scientific knowledge into new approaches to medicine. Regenerative medicine offers hope to patients disabled by trauma, disease, genetic factors, and aging. Advances in this field will hinge on the ability to effectively combine the frontiers of technology, biology, and clinical medicine to develop regenerative strategies.

In 2004, IBNAM researchers from the fields of neurology, surgery, endocrinology, materials science, chemistry, biomedical engineering, and chemical engineering initiated a Bioengineering Research Partnership (BRP) to explore new technologies for regeneration of the central nervous system (CNS) and cell replacement therapies for diabetic patients. Their collaborations have demonstrated in animal models that bioactive scaffolds can regenerate axons in the injured spinal cord.  They have also developed several innovative scaffolds to restore euglycemia to diabetic mice through islet transplantation, including a pro-angiogenic scaffold to help transplanted cells survive that may be of general interest in regenerative therapies.

Recently, the BRP team has developed two new scaffold technologies and future investigations will use these scaffolds in more advanced modalities for spinal cord injury and islet transplantation.