Engineered body parts discussed at conference

The future of engineered body parts will be discussed and scrutinised by the world’s leading tissue engineers at the University of Sydney in November.

Tissue engineering and regenerative medicine luminaries will share their views on the state of this research area at the third Sydney University Tissue Engineering Network (SuTEN) Symposium. They include researchers who have grown new bones shaped to fill specific bone defects and built artificial lungs from harvested tissue.

“Tissue engineering is well on the way to enabling the replacement of diseased and damaged tissue and organs,” says SuTEN founder Associate Professor Hala Zreiqat from the University’s Faculty of Engineering and Information Technologies. "Here in Sydney we’re leading the way in engineering skin, bones, blood vessels and nerves.

“But the scientific challenges behind building viable complex tissues outside the body remain vast. This conference gives us a chance to collaborate with leaders in the field from both home and abroad.”

Professor Laura Niklason is a Professor at Yale University in Biomedical Engineering and Anaesthesia, who works with the development of engineered blood vessels for implantation and other cellular therapies. Earlier this year, Professor Niklason led a research group which successfully implanted an artificial lung - into a live rat. They were the first to make a tissue in vitro that can exchange gas, in this case carbon dioxide. Elsewhere, Professor Niklason’s research focuses primarily on regenerative strategies for cardiovascular tissues and the impact of biomechanical signals of tissue differentiation and development.

Professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic is a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University, where she directs the laboratory for stem cells and tissue engineering. This year, her research group was the first to create a clinically sized piece of bone from human cells in a way that maintained all cells viable and functional. Columbia University has since placed a patent on engineering anatomical bones. Elected to the New York Academy of Sciences last year, Gordana is a frequent adviser to government organisations on tissue engineering and regenerative medicine. Her research focus is on engineering functional tissues for use as models of diseases, in regenerative medicine and studies of stem cells.

Prof Dennis E Discher is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania in the School of Engineering and Applied Science and in Graduate Groups in Cell & Molecular Biology and Physics. He says cells seem to have an acute sense of ‘touch’ that allows them to feel the elasticity of different environments. Engineering ‘solid’ tissues relies on the adhesion of cells to non-cellular tissue (matrices). Professor Discher’s group was the first to show that the elasticity of matrices has a bearing on the type of cells that best adhere to them to build viable, new tissue.

Event details of the 'SuTEN Symposium: Tissue Engineering and Regenerative Medicine - the next 20 years'
When: 9-11 November 2010
Where: Darlington Centre, The University of Sydney
Website: http://www.eng.usyd.edu.au/webnet/SuTEN/index.html