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Home-grown Bone
19 March 2016

Home-grown Bone

Today, replacing damaged bones with ones grown in a lab is already a reality. Scientists can grow mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) from the patient’s bone marrow on a porous ceramic scaffold, as shown in this scanning electron microscope image, and attach it to their healthy bone. However, MSCs can also turn into muscle or fat cells, so it’s vital to ensure that they turn, or differentiate, into bone cells. The ceramic scaffold plays an important role in this: like the supporting scaffold of real bone, it contains calcium which induces MSCs to differentiate into bone cells rather than muscle or fat. Researchers are studying how calcium does this, by finding out which genes were activated at various times after the MSCs were placed on the scaffold. This will help test new scaffolds, with different shapes or components, for how effective they are at helping the cells differentiate.

Written by Esther Redhouse White

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