Injectable 'Bone Spackling' Could Heal Complex Fractures

University of Michigan  researchers are targeting large, complex bone wounds, where a lot of bone has been lost and the tissue around the bone has been damaged. These types of injuries often require grafts and multiple surgeries. The researchers are reprogramming adult cells from bone marrow so that they can be injected directly into a wound and grow into bone. The marrow-derived cells are known as progenitor cells, a type of adult stem cell that maintains the ability to differentiate into several different cell types. Testing in mice has shown that a cell-based therapy can drastically accelerate the bone regeneration process after injury.

Transcript

00:00:01 University of Michigan researchers are developing a better bone grafting technique. [beads rattling] They're using an injection instead of invasive surgery. Demonstrated in mice, they harvest STEM cells from bone marrow or fat, accelerate the cell growth, then inject them into the graft site. >> Stegemann: One of the main reasons that we're doing what we're doing is so that you can get kind of an off-the-shelf products. Kind of analogous to spackle you might use on drywall, so you can actually inject them through a needle, so there's no need to cut the patient open

00:00:34 and use very invasive techniques, and they'll regenerate new bone more quickly than the current options we have. Creating these modules, creating these little micro tissues, culturing them outside the body, and priming them to regenerate bone before we transplant them actually does very significantly increase the amount of bone that you can regenerate.