McGowan Institute?
July 2005 | VOL. 7 | www.McGowan.pitt.edu
Dr. Savio L-Y. Woo, Whiteford Professor and Director of the Musculoskeletal Research Center, in the Department of Bioengineering has been selected to receive the 2005 Robert Henry Thurston Lecture Award from The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). This prestigious societal award was established in 1925 to honor Robert Henry Thurston, the first president of the ASME and is given yearly to the person who best encourages stimulating thinking on a subject of broad technical interest to engineers.
Dr. Woo will be honored with this award at the ASME International Mechanical Engineering Conference in Orlando, Florida on November 10, 2005, where he will deliver a lecture entitled, “Going From In Vitro to In Vivo: The New Challenge for Tissue Engineering in Keeping the Knee and Shoulder Healthy.”
Dr. Woo established the Musculoskeletal Research Center (MSRC) in 1990 for the purpose of developing integrated programs on orthopaedic education and research. The MSRC is a flourishing enterprise where engineers, scientists and physicians get together with the help of a dedicated staff, to guide and teach highly qualified students, research fellows and residents. The Center’s research is focused in three areas: 1) functional tissue engineering, 2) mechanobiology and 3) robotics and computational biomechanics. The Center’s laboratories, namely Mechanobiology, Tissue Mechanics, Anterior Cruciate Ligament, and Shoulder Dynamics are organized to focus the research efforts on these three areas.
MSRC researchers are investigating the use of functional tissue engineering approaches, including the utilization of antisense gene therapy and bioscaffolds to enhance the healing of ligaments following injury. In addition, a robotic/UFS testing system is utilized to determine the kinematics of the knee and in situ forces in ligaments to assess the effects of injury and reconstruction as well as to make recommendations for surgical treatment and rehabilitation following knee injuries.
The MSRC has earned a national and international reputation of excellence in basic and clinical research. Over two thousand visitors have toured the Center and interacted with the research teams. For more on the MSRC, please see www.pitt.edu/~msrc.
Based on the substantial feedback following the annual McGowan Institute retreats that more networking sessions would be beneficial, the Institute is planning networking sessions from 5 to 7 PM on September 14th and December 5th at S100A, South BST. Please save the date(s) and look forward to some interesting and novel themes, as well as great opportunities to meet new colleagues and potential collaborators.
The pioneering research of Dr. Stephen Badylak has led to the discovery of a bioengineered tissue scaffold that promotes wound healing. The bioengineered material is playing a crucial role in treating conditions ranging from incontinence to burns. His discovery has evolved into a significant advance in tissue engineering, laying the groundwork for a host of new medical treatments. This work is currently highlighted by the UPMC Health Journal.
The material which is derived from the small intestines of pigs is increasingly used by surgeons to restore damaged tissues and support the body’s own healing process. Physicians rely on the material, called small intestinal submucosa (SIS), for everything from reconstructing ligaments to treating incontinence. Today, SIS is most commonly used to help the body close hard-to-heal wounds such as second-degree burns, chronic pressure ulcers, diabetic skin ulcers, and deep skin lacerations.
SIS, for example, which relies on an extracellular matrix, can be configured into sheets, gels, powders, and multilaminate forms for orthopedic use and hernia repair. In its early stages, scientists engineered SIS primarily from a mechanical perspective. Researchers were looking for a material shaped like a tube, the size of blood vessels, and strong enough to be sutured while also sustaining the contraction and expansion of a pulsating artery. Scientists have since realized that engineering SIS from a biochemical standpoint is paramount. For successful healing to occur, the graft tissue must foster a molecular environment that can speed up the body’s own healing process.
Dr. Badylak’s quest for improvements in the technology and to expand the applications is being pursued through currently funded NIBIB research, where he is trying to understand the biomolecular, immunologic, anatomical, and biomechanical processes of SIS.
For additional recent McGowan Institute materials on Dr. Badylak’s research and outcomes please see:
• Dolphin Quest Enlists University of Pittsburgh Specialist to Develop Custom ‘Scaffold’ for Dolphin’s Tissue Repair
• From the Lab, to Commerce, to the Clinic…
• McGowan Scientists Recognized
• Bioengineered Tissue Scaffold Promotes Wound Healing
In a ground-breaking study, Professor Johnny Huard and his colleagues have discovered that adult, or post-natal, stem cells have the same ability as embryonic stem cells to multiply, a previously unknown characteristic indicating that post-natal stem cells may play an important therapeutic role.
Adult and post-natal stem cells are often overlooked in favor of embryonic stem cells in the national debate over the therapeutic use of stem cells. Until now, it has been generally believed that embryonic stem cells had a greater capacity to multiply than post-natal stem cells, making them more desirable to research as a potential treatment, according to Johnny Huard, PhD, Director of the Growth and Development Laboratory at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh and Deputy Director of the McGowan Institute.
“Scientists have typically believed that adult or post-natal stem cells grow old and die much sooner than embryonic stem cells, but this study demonstrates that is not the case,” said Dr. Huard, senior author of the study. “The entire world is closely following the advances in stem cell research, and everyone is interested in the potential of stem cells to treat everything from diabetes to Parkinson’s disease. But there are also many ethical concerns surrounding the use of embryonic stem cells, concerns that you don’t have with post-natal or adult stem cells. My belief is that this study should erase doubts scientists may have had about the potential effectiveness of post-natal stem cells.”
Researchers in Dr. Huard’s laboratory were able to expand post-natal stem cells to a population level comparable to that reached by researchers using embryonic stem cells. Previous research has found that embryonic stem cells could undergo more than 200 population doublings before the cells began to die. A population doubling is a method of measuring the age of a population of cells.
Bridget Deasy, PhD, a scientist in Dr. Huard’s laboratory, was first author of the study. She discovered that a unique population of muscle-derived stem cells was able to undergo more than 200 population doublings, as well. These post-natal cells were able to undergo population doublings while maintaining their ability to regenerate muscle in an animal model, a key finding indicating that they could maintain their treatment potential.
This ability to self-replenish is significant because in order for stem cells to be used for treatment, a large quantity of the cells would be required.
The findings are published in the July 1, 2005, issue of Molecular Biology of the Cell, published by the American Society for Cell Biology.
There also may be important advantages to post-natal stem cells when it comes to autoimmunity, according to Dr. Huard. The use of embryonic stem cells could be complicated by issues of rejection, with the recipient’s immune system rejecting the foreign embryonic stem cells. With post-natal stem cells taken from the recipient and then reintroduced in an autologous manner, rejection would not be an issue.
Dr. Huard currently is working with the stem cells he discovered while searching for a cure for Duchene muscular dystrophy (DMD), a genetic disease that is estimated to affect one in every 3,500 boys. DMD is the most common form of muscular dystrophy affecting children and patients often die in early adulthood because of heart damage.
In addition to searching for a cure for DMD, Dr. Huard’s laboratory also is researching the use of stem cells to repair injured muscle following sports-related injuries, as well as to treat cardiac, joint and bone injuries. His work with these stem cells has potential implications ranging from repairing heart muscle damaged by heart attack or disease to the prevention of rejection during organ and tissue transplantation. More
Nearly three years ago, Robert L. Kormos, M.D. in collaboration with the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) established a Mechanical Circulatory Support device registry.
That pioneering effort led to the establishment a national registry managed by the ISHLT. The ISHLT Consortium now comprises 70 institutions. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI) of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) recently announced that it has awarded a $6 million federal research contract to the University of Alabama at Birmingham to manage a multi-institutional registry and provide scientific direction for patients receiving a mechanical circulatory support device (MCSD) for the treatment of advanced heart failure. This 5-year contact is headed by James K. Kirklin, M.D., University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Data analysis will be performed at the University of Alabama at Birmingham under the direction of the principal investigator Dr. Kirklin, Professor of Surgery, Director of Cardiothoracic Transplantation, and Dr. David Naftel, head statistician for the project. The co-principal investigators are Dr. Robert Kormos, Professor of Surgery, Director, Artificial Heart Program, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, and Medical Director of the McGowan Institute, and by Dr. Lynne Warner-Stevenson, Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
The contributions to the project from Pittsburgh will also come from Dennis McNamara, M.D. who serves as the chair of the Blood and Tissue Sample subcommittee of the MCSD Registry Steering Committee.
The institutions involved in the collaborative project are currently utilizing MCSDs for the treatment of end stage heart failure. The Registry is designed to advance MCSD therapy by aiding in the development of technology and reporting standards, and ultimately improving patient outcomes for those with advanced heart failure. According to the NHLBI, it is anticipated that the registry will collect data, blood and tissue samples from approximately 2,000 new patients per year for a period of five years.
Single sided deafness is diagnosed in more than 60,000 people each year, and many of these people are unaware that there are options when it comes to selecting a hearing device reports Barry Hirsch, M.D., director, division of neurotology at the UPMC Eye and Ear Institute.
For people with single sided deafness (SSD), the UPMC Eye and Ear Institute is offering the Baha System, a newer, more effective hearing aid. The Baha System uses bone conduction to transmit sound, stimulating the cochlea from the normal hearing ear, allowing someone with SSD to experience the sensation of hearing and understanding sounds from both sides of the head.