Sticks and stones might break your bones, but bioengineered environments could regrow them
Sticks and stones might break your bones, but bioengineered environments could regrow them lead image
If you fracture a bone in multiple places, a surgeon might prescribe an autologous bone graft, the use of bone tissue taken from a noninjured body part to heal the fracture. Though considered a gold-standard treatment, such grafts still have risks of poor bone regeneration and infection, particularly in elderly patients and those with other co-morbidities.
To overcome these current limitations, researchers experimented with creating bioengineered bone microenvironments, which replicate the main components that control bone repair. Such environments show great promise in increasing bone regeneration.
Oliveira et al. present an overview of the state of the field, including the description of several 3D bioengineered microenvironment strategies and their applications.
“We thought that a review of the current strategies designed to recapitulate the bone microenvironment, ranging from simple to complex strategies, could be important to show and clarify their main advantages, disadvantages, potential applications, and future directions,” said author Claudia Oliveira.
Bone microenvironments allow researchers to investigate the interplay of cellular and noncellular components and how they regulate bone regeneration. Researchers hope they could be used to develop new treatments for bone disorders and improve the next generation of bone implants.
“I think that bioengineered bone microenvironments could give us the possibility to precisely control and modulate several components of the bone microenvironment aiming to increase the regenerative capacity of the bone tissue in a self-regulated manner,” Oliveira said. “I hope that in the future we can provide bioengineered strategies for personalized therapy of large bone fractures/defects and several bone-related pathologies.”
Source: “New insights into the biomimetic design and biomedical applications of bioengineered bone microenvironments,” by Cláudia S. Oliveira, Sander Leeuwenburgh, and João F. Mano, APL Bioengineering (2021). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0065152 .
