When:     7:00 pm, Tuesday, April 10, 2012
Where:    Room 110, Harned Hall, Saint Martin’s University, 5300 Pacific Avenue SE, Lacey, Washington

Rebuilding People: Auto Parts to Autologous Tissues
Through most of human history, failing body parts have led to pain, limited mobility, loss of function or death. Replacement body parts emerged in the 1940s with early artificial joints, synthetic eye lenses and kidney dialysis. Today, medical implants are a $300 billion industry.

But synthetic materials are prone to the foreign-body response, in which the patient’s cells wall off the new entity to isolate it from the body. To combat this effect, our lab developed a class of porous, synthetic scaffolds that minimize the foreign-body response and encourage the restoration of healthy, living tissue around the implant.

There is a commonality in living organisms’ reactions to today’s implants: flattened white blood cells (macrophages) attempt to engulf the biomaterial starting at about 48 hours. We hypothesize that our new, porous materials mechanically drive these macrophage cells down a healing pathway, rather than an “attack” pathway.

This opens up a new possibility: creating materials to help the body heal itself. These macrophages that surround the UW scaffold may transform into some or all of the new cells and tissues in the healed implant. Thus, we may be able to use engineered materials to guide the body’s own regenerative potential.

Our speaker this month is Buddy D. Ratner, Ph.D. Dr. Ratner is Professor, Departments of Bioengineering and Chemical Engineering, University of Washington, Director, UW Engineered Biomaterials, Michael L. & Myrna Darland Endowed Chair in Technology Commercialization