According to an announcement made on February 15, 2022, McGill University researchers adopted the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan to create a unique approach for manufacturing synthetic bone tissue. The discovery comes after more than 30 years of research by the scientific community to provide an artificial alternative to bone transplants for the repair of sick or damaged bones.
Bone tissue engineering is a fast-expanding science that focuses on growing bone cells on scaffolds in the lab and then transplanting these structures into the body to repair bone injury. The scaffolds, like the bone they resemble, require an interconnection of small and large pores to enable cells and nutrients to disseminate and aid in the formation of new bone tissue.
The McGill research team discovered a way to change the inner structure of a substance called graphene oxide to make it more favourable for bone tissue regeneration. Graphene oxide is a super-thin, super-strong material that’s finding its way into optics, electronics, chemistry, biology, and energy storage. When stem cells are placed on graphene oxide, they tend to change into bone-generating osteoblasts due to the material’s unique characteristics.
Researchers from McGill’s departments of Mining and Materials Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Dentistry make up the multidisciplinary research team. The researchers discovered that freezing graphene oxide at two different temperatures after adding an emulsion of oil and water gave two distinct diameters of pores throughout the material.
When stem cells from mouse bone marrow were “seeded” into the now-porous framework, the cells proliferated and dispersed inside the network of pores, indicating that the new method could potentially be utilised to rebuild bone tissue in people.
In a company press release, Marta Cerruti, a materials engineering professor at McGill University, said, they showed that the scaffolds are totally biocompatible, that the cells are happy once users put them in there, and that they’re able to penetrate all the scaffold and colonise the whole scaffold. The researchers employed the CLS’s BioMedical Imaging and Therapy–bend magnet beamline to see the various sized pores inside the scaffolding, as well as the cells’ development and dissemination.
To their knowledge, this is the first time anyone has utilised synchrotron light to see the geometry of graphene oxide scaffolds, said Yiwen Chen, lead researcher and Cerruti’s collaborator. Widespread clinical implementation of this new technique may still be many years away, but the discovery could enable other researchers to understand more about how stem cells change into bone cells.
In a press release, Cerruti added that this might lead to a greater understanding of the genetics of skeletons that wouldn’t have been understood otherwise. In the short term, they might be able to use lab methods to better understand bone and maybe come up with new medicines.
