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Grafting towards better ways to heal bones and joints
Grafting towards better ways to heal bones and joints

Grafting towards better ways to heal bones and joints

This week’s Spotlight on Research is with Assistant Professor Tanya Levingstone, DCU School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering and Principal Investigator at the Centre for Medical Engineering Research (MEDeng) DCU and Advanced Materials and BioEngineering Research (Amber) Centre.

You are developing new materials to help heal bone and cartilage. Why are you doing that?

“There’s a huge demand for materials to help bones and cartilage in joints heal, so we are looking at ways to make or engineer tissues in the lab that can be used to help healing and regrowth in the body.

At the moment, bone grafts are the second-most common transplants carried out, blood transfusions are the most common.

In a bone graft, the surgeon takes a piece of bone from another part of the body (often the hip) and uses it to fix a badly fractured or diseased bone elsewhere.

This means extra pain and recovery for the patient, and the grafted bone itself may not be great quality.

To get around that we are building new, artificial grafts that could just be taken off the shelf and grafted into the site where you want new bone or cartilage to grow and heal the injury.”

What have you been working on?

“For a lot of my career I have been working on a graft or scaffold to help repair cartilage in joints, such as the knee.

Cartilage is the spongy tissue that helps to cushion joints and when it gets damaged or wears away the joint becomes very painful.

For several years I worked in the Tissue Engineering Research Group in the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland with Professor Fergal O'Brien, and we developed new scaffolds to help cartilage regrow.

The technology was licensed out to a start-up company, SurgaColl Technologies, and it has been successfully tested in a competitive horse who had knee damage.

The horse is still training today.”

How is that research progressing now?

“It’s very exciting because now we have seen how well it worked in the horse, we are preparing to start the first trials in humans.

The graft material will be used in knee operations and we will assess the functions and repair of the knee over the course of two years afterwards.”

You moved to DCU about a year ago, what is your research focusing on here?

“I’m engineering new materials to help bones repair, which is similar to the work I did before but with a bit extra.

For this work as well as making the graft material, which encourages bone to grow, we want to use the graft as a way to deliver genes into cells at the injured site and support the healing even further.”

Are you working much with other researchers in DCU?

“Yes, there are quite a few of us here working together.

I’m collaborating on the gene-delivery project with my DCU colleague Professor Nicholas Dunne, and a group of us are together working within the Centre for Medical Engineering Research (MEDeng) here.

It’s not just research too, we are also looking at new methods of teaching engineering here and hope to further expand this along with experts at DCU School of Education.

We will also be hosting the Bioengineering in Ireland (www.binirl.com) meeting, which is always really interesting, you get the top researchers in Ireland attending and talking at it.”

What do you like to do when you are not working on the tissue engineered grafts?

“I love the outdoors. We live in Wicklow and it’s great to go walking there. We also have a campervan, I enjoy camping.”

And finally, what originally inspired you to become an engineer?

“When I was leaving school and choosing a course for college, I was interested in a lot of different things – science, medicine, healthcare, physiotherapy - and I thought that biomedical engineering would cover many aspects of those, so I came to DCU and studied it.

It was a great way to bring those interests together and I think a basic degree in engineering gives you flexibility, you can follow plenty of different routes after that.

There’s also a huge amount of creativity in engineering and I love that you can have the freedom to design and develop new things that will have a positive benefit for people.”