Regenerating Blood Vessels and Bone with Biomaterials and Nanotechnology
When diseases like osteoporosis prevent bones from repairing themselves or when blockages damage blood vessels, patients must often turn to medications with harsh side effects for treatment or vascular grafts that soon become blocked themselves.
, wants to change that with a novel approach: re-engineering bone and tissue outside of the body to be introduced as superagents of repair.
Dr. Wang, an assistant professor in the Joint Department of Biomedical Engineering at the 抖阴短视频 (抖阴短视频) and Marquette University, has created nanoparticles from pig bone that help human bone regenerate in a more targeted way than current therapies. She has also used amniotic membranes to create vascular grafts for blood vessels that can both restore blood flow long-term and help native tissue regenerate.
As she innovates new treatments and works to understand just why these materials are so successful at regeneration, her goal is to translate her work for use in the clinic and beyond.
“My dream is to commercialize these materials to help patients,” she says. “And 抖阴短视频 is such a good research environment in which to do that.”
Using Medical Waste for Tissue Repair
Dr. Wang didn’t begin her career as a bioengineer or material scientist – she began as a dentist who performed craniofacial surgeries, including repairing cleft palates. While conducting research for her master’s thesis, she saw another student bring in an amniotic membrane to help surgically repair a facial defect.
The amniotic membrane – a thin layer on the placenta that contains blood vessels, nerves, and stem cells – also turned out to be an ideal material for cleft palate regeneration.
“It’s an amazing material because it is very simple tissue, but it causes very good regeneration within the body,” Dr. Wang says. “It’s also very available, since it is medical waste after birth. It’s cheap and easy to obtain. All of my future work became trying to figure out why this material is so amazing.”
After getting her PhD and serving as an assistant professor at Alabama State University, Dr. Wang joined 抖阴短视频 in 2019. Here, her research took off in two fascinating directions: bone and blood vessel repair.
She first wondered if the amniotic membrane could be used not only in facial repair but also in a blood vessel graft that could promote regeneration. It’s a complex task: many current FDA-approved synthetic vascular grafts cause inflammation and only work for a short timeframe before becoming blocked themselves, and they do not promote regeneration.
Dr. Wang and her team that was long-lasting and even encouraged the surrounding vascular cells to regenerate. In tests with animal models, “our graft didn’t get blocked at all,” she says. “It’s a very, very promising candidate for an alternative to synthetic grafts.”
The team is now turning the material into nanoparticles that could help regenerate blood vessels even more. When the nanoparticles were co-cultured with endothelial cells – the cells that line blood vessels and play an important role in regulating blood flow – they helped reverse the inflammation of native endothelial cells.
“These amniotic membranes are a very general material that could help repair many different tissues,” she says.
Engineering Bone into Nanoparticles
Dr. Wang’s research also extends to helping bone regenerate. Bones heal through a complex process involving bone marrow stem cells, and this process is disrupted for patients with diseases like osteoporosis and bone cancer.
Current therapies are often ineffective, with substantial side effects. Since bone does not have blood vessels, it is more difficult to deliver drugs to it. Current drugs also have a short circulation time within the body, which means they must be administrated at high levels more frequently to work.
Dr. Wang and her team to act as repair and drug delivery agents within the body. These nanoparticles can stimulate regeneration within bones and can do so for sustained timeframes.
Her team showed that these nanoparticles helped bone marrow stem cells by enhancing cell survival and promoting proliferation of stem cells. The nanoparticles can also be infused with proteins that can further promote growth and regeneration.
“The nanoparticles can release drugs from several weeks to several months, which will help bone healing since that takes much longer than tissue healing,” Wang says.
Next, her team will design the nanoparticles to find and bind to bone within the body, so that they can simply be injected.
Dr. Wang and her team have already filed patents for her designed nanoparticles with the goal of commercializing them. First, she plans to delve even deeper to better understand at a molecular level just why her bone and amniotic membrane nanoparticles are so successful.
“We spent years doing these studies just to show how well our materials work and now it’s time to figure out why,” she says. “I have great collaborators and a very supportive department, so I’m very lucky that I can continue to study these amazing materials.”
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