News

BME Professor’s Bioresorbable Splint Saves Baby’s Life

A custom-designed and -fabricated bioresorbable tracheal splint made by BME Professor Scott Hollister, PhD, and Otolaryngology Associate Professor Glenn Green, MD, was used in a patient for the first time last February to save the life of a baby suffering with severe tracheomalacia. Despite the best medical treatment, the baby’s windpipe continued to collapse and he was requiring resuscitation daily. Hollister and Green obtained emergency clearance from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to create and implant a device they’d been developing. Computer-designed from a CT scan of the baby’s trachea and created from polycaprolactone using 3D printing techniques, the splint is sewn on top of the bronchus and provides a “skeleton” to help the windpipe grow into a healthy state. This takes about two to three years, during which the material dissolves naturally into the body. The patient was off ventilator support 21 days after the procedure and has not had breathing trouble since. Hollister called the experience the highlight of his career. The case is featured in the May 23 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine. The team has received Humanitarian Use Device (HUD) designation from the FDA and is applying to begin a clinical trial.

A press release and video on the splint are available at: http://umhealth.me/kaiba

Tags: 3D printing, bioresorbable polymer, glenn green md, Hollister, image-based design, infant tracheobronchomalacia, Michigan Engineering, Mott Children's Hospital, pediatric device device consortium, polycaprolactone, Scaffold Tissue Engineering, Scott Hollister, scott hollister phd, tracheomalacia in children, University of Michigan Health System
Posted in All News, Faculty News, Spotlight

Ram Rao honored as 2013 RPM Ventures Student Entrepreneur of the Year

2013 RPM Ventures Student Entrepreneur of the Year award winners Carolyn Yarina and Ram Rao

BME Ph.D. candidate Ram Rao is one of two recipients of the 2013 RPM Ventures Student Entrepreneur of the Year award! In 2010, Rao co-founded STIgma Free Diagnostics, a medical device company dedicated to developing a rapid at-home test for the detection of common sexually transmitted diseases. Ram is a member of BME Professor Jan Stegemann’s CMITE lab. Congratulations, Ram and keep up the great work!

Read more about the award and Ram here: http://bit.ly/Y8otjF

Tags: Awards, CMITE Lab, entrepreneurship, Jan Stegemann, Ram Rao, RPM ventures, student entrepreneur of the year, umich, umich student entrepreneurs
Posted in All News, Student/Post-Doc News

Building better blood vessels could advance tissue engineering

ANN ARBOR—One of the major obstacles to growing new organs—replacement hearts, lungs and kidneys—is the difficulty researchers face in building blood vessels that keep the tissues alive, but new findings from the University of Michigan could help overcome this roadblock.

“It’s not just enough to make a piece of tissue that functions like your desired target,” said Andrew Putnam, U-M associate professor of biomedical engineering. “If you don’t nourish it with blood by vascularizing it, it’s only going to be as big as the head of a pen.

“But we need a heart that’s this big,” he added, holding up his fist.

More immediately, doctors and researchers believe figuring out how to grow working blood vessels might offer treatments for diseases that affect the circulatory system such as diabetes. Perhaps the right drug or injection could save patients’ feet from amputation.

Putnam and his colleagues have revealed why one of the leading approaches to building blood vessels isn’t consistently working: It’s making leaky tubes. They also demonstrated how adult stem cells could solve this problem. A paper on the findings is published online in Tissue Engineering Part A, and will appear in a forthcoming print edition.

Today, biomedical researchers are taking two main approaches to growing new capillaries, the smallest blood vessels and those responsible for exchanging oxygen, carbon dioxide and nutrients between blood and muscles or organs.

One group of researchers is developing drug compounds that would signal existing vessels to branch into new tributaries. These compounds—generally protein growth factors—mimic how cancerous tumor cells recruit blood vessels.

The other group, which includes the U-M team, is using a cell-based method. This technique involves injecting cells within a scaffolding carrier near the spot where you want new capillaries to materialize. In Putnam’s approach, they deliver endothelial cells, which make up the vessel lining and supporting cells. Their scaffolding carrier is fibrin, a protein in the human body that helps blood clot.

“The cells know what to do,” Putnam said. “You can take these things and mix them and put them in an animal. Literally, it’s as easy as a simple injection and over a few days, they spontaneously form new vessels and the animals’ own vasculature connects to them.”

But it turns out these vessels don’t always thrive. The U-M team aimed to figure out why. In reading previously published findings, Putnam noticed that researchers used “a mishmash of support cells,” and the field had paid little attention to which ones work best. So that’s where he and his colleagues focused.

In their experiments, they mixed three recipes of blood vessel starter solutions, each with a different commonly used supporting cell type: lung fibroblasts, adult stem cells from fat and adult stem cells from bone marrow. They also made a version with no supporting cells at all. They injected each solution under the skin of mice, and allowed the new blood vessels to form over a period of two weeks. At various points in time, they injected a tracer dye into the animals’ circulation to help them see how well the engineered capillaries held blood, and whether they were connected to the animals’ existing vessel networks.

The researchers found that the solution with no support cells and the one with the lung fibroblasts produced immature, misshapen human capillaries that leaked. They could tell because the tracer dye pooled in the tissue around the new vessels. On the other hand, the solutions with both types of adult stem cells gave rise to robust human capillaries that kept blood and dye inside them.

The paper notes that one popular method biomedical engineers use to check the success of their efforts—counting blood vessels—might not be an ideal measure. The adult stem cell solutions produced fewer blood vessels than the others, in one case less than half. But the vessels they did build were stronger. And upon further analysis, the researchers found evidence that the adult stem cells may be able to differentiate into the kind of mature, smooth muscle cells that support larger blood vessels.

“The adult stem cells from fat and bone marrow both work equally well,” Putnam said. “If we want to use this clinically in five to 10 years, I think it’s crucial for the field to focus on a support cell that actually has some stem cell characteristics.”

Down the road, Putnam envisions that doctors could get these support cells from individual patients themselves—either from their bone marrow or fat—and then inject them near the site where the new blood vessels are needed.

The paper is titled, “Stromal Cell Identity Influences the In Vivo Functionality of Engineered Capillary Networks Formed by Co-delivery of Endothelial Cells and Stromal Cells.” The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health (Grant Numbers R01-HL085339 and R01-HL085339-03).

Published on Apr 04, 2013
Contact Nicole Casal Moore

Related Links:
Original U-M News Service article: http://www.ns.umich.edu/new/multimedia/videos/21358-building-better-blood-vessels-could-advance-tissue-engineering
Full text of paper: http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/pdf/10.1089/ten.tea.2012.0281
Andrew Putnam: www.sitemaker.umich.edu/cset/home

Tags: Andrew Putnam, Blood vessels, build blood vessels, cell engineering, College of Engineering, engineering alumni, engineering topics, engineering video, healthcare, mconnex, michepedia, michigan alumni, Michigan Engineering, Professor Putnam, Putnam, replacement organs, Stem Cells, Tissue Engineering, u-m, u-m alumni, UM, University of Michigan, uofm
Posted in All News, Faculty News, Spotlight

Sakib Elahi and William Lloyd Receive 2013 Outstanding GSI Award

Two Biomedical Engineering graduate students were among the the 2013 recipients of the Outstanding Graduate Student Instructor Awards sponsored by the Rackham Graduate School. Sakib Elahi and William Lloyd, both took home the 2013 Outstanding GSI award. Sakib has been the GSI for BME 231, 241, and 458 and Bill was GSI for BME 450, 499, and 241. Sakib and Bill are both members of BME Professor Mary-Ann Mycek’s Biomedical Optics Laser Laboratory. The awards ceremony that will honor these talented teachers will be held on Thursday, April 18, 2013 at 2:00 p.m. in the Rackham Amphitheater with a public reception to follow.

Tags: Awards, Graduate Student, Graduate Student Instructor, GSI, Instructor, Mary Ann Mycek, Mycek, Outstanding GSI
Posted in All News, Student/Post-Doc News

Targeting Disease With Nanoparticles

“Nanoparticles, which are popular candidates for ferrying drugs to target locations in the human body, have been shown to evade the immune system and infiltrate tissues and cells. This makes them effective in delivering medication for conditions such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.

But, Michigan Engineering Professor Lola Eniola-Adefeso and her team has discovered they’re no good at leaving the bloodstream, getting trapped instead by red blood cells. To combat that, researchers are exploring the possibility of different shapes for these nanoparticles, to help them more effectively navigate to their targets.”

Professor Lola Eniola-Adefeso, who also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biomedical Engineering along with her position in Chemical Engineering, is featured in the latest MconneX MichEpedia video. Check it out here!

Tags: arteriosclerosis, biomedical engineering, blood cells, Cancer, cardiovascular disease, Chemical Engineering, College of Engineering, drug carriers, engineering alumni, engineering topics, engineering video, lola eniola-adefeso, mconnex, michepedia, michigan alumni, Michigan Engineering, nano drug carriers, nano engineering, nano spheres, nanoparticles, professor eniola, red blood cells, u-m, u-m alumni, UM, University of Michigan, uofm
Posted in All News, Faculty News, Spotlight