Systems biology driven tissue engineering

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Arthritis disables more than 4 million Canadians, causing pain, limiting the quality of life, and having a major impact on health care costs ($4.4 billion/yr in Canada as of 2000) Current treatments involve analgesics to reduce pain, and in severe cases, load-bearing joints such as hips and knees are replaced. Unfortunately, these artificial implants often fail because the material used to make them is incompatible with our bodies. What is needed is either better drug therapies for patients to regrow cartilage or the development of biological joints (knees and hips, etc). Our project is designed to understand the development of cartilage cells (the cells of the joint) from two potential replacement cell sources (pluripotent stem cells and mesenchymal stromal cells) and then improve on the differentiation of these cells into cartilage tissue. To do this, we will develop networks (essentially roadmaps) of how these stem cells differentiate into cartilage and other cells and then manipulate the differentiation cultures to improve conditions to convert the stem cells into joint cartilage. Along the way, we should identify drug pathways that will be used in the future to screen for drugs that will be used to replace cartilage in arthritis patients.