Bio-inspired bone regeneration

Our lab aims to develop regenerative therapies targeting bone defects. We adopt cell-based and cell-free strategies across the spectrum from basic lab studies to pre-clinical and clinical trials with a focus on regeneration of bone, cartilage and blood vessels.

We are a young group working on bone regeneration of the facial structures. Patients with maxillofacial bone defects need bone tissue substitutes to reshape their face, to speak and to anchor teeth for chewing food. These bone defects may arise from an accident, cancer, infection or due to congenital malformations. Examples of defects include cleft palate, sinus floor augmentation, alveolar augmentation or segmental mandibular defects.

Our team designs bio-inspired regenerative approaches to restore such defects. We employ stem cell technologies or biomaterials advances with state-of-the-art regenerative technologies to recapitulate natural tissue development and regeneration.

The majority of our research projects aim at two cell-based routes to bone regeneration, inspired by natural mechanisms.

1) Recapitulation of endochondral bone formation so far has proven to offer great potential for translation into clinical application. This concept is based on the implantation of an engineered (lab-grown) cartilage tissue that following implantation can be remodeled by the body into patient-own bone. A modular strategy is currently adopted where small cartilage tissues are engineered that serve as building blocks to assemble a bone template of desired size and shape. Our modules are non-living, which enables scale-up, storage and off-the-shelf use. Current efforts are under the XLbone project (NWO).

2) The creation of large engineered tissue constructs requires the introduction of vasculature. These prevascularized bone constructs could be applied in large clinical defects with limited vascular supply, including e.g. mandibular defects after oncological resections or in non-unions. We have established methods to create capillary-like networks in biomaterial-based lab cultures. Also, regeneration of small diameter blood vessels is researched in our group. Current efforts are directed at the generation of multi-scale vascular networks and in vitro models.

Smaller projects in our lab are for example exploring the use of dental pulp stem cells and calcium phosphates to restore bone defects.

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