Mechanical enhancement of a tissue-engineered scaffold for bone regeneration

With over 600,000 patients suffering from bone deficiencies annually in the United States, bone regeneration has come to the forefront of medical research. Current repair treatments utilize autografts (transplanting a patient´s own bone from one site to another) and allografts (tissue donated from a cadaver) to treat extensive bone fractures. Although the autograft is the benchmark treatment, both autografts and allografts have their drawbacks such as donor site morbidity and disease transmission, respectively. As a result, alternative treatment methods including tissue-engineered solutions are being explored to potentially circumvent these disadvantages. The Musculoskeletal Tissue Regeneration laboratory has previously created a composite trabecular and cortical biomimetic synthetic bone scaffold, which mimics the architecture of native bone. However, the compressive strength of the current cortical scaffold does not match that of native bone. This study specifically focuses on the incorporation of sintered hydroxyapatite (HAP) columns to enhance the mechanical properties of these scaffolds, particularly under compressive loads. The integration of mechanically enhanced HAP columns serves as a promising step towards developing one of the first biomimetic bone scaffolds that exhibits the mechanical properties of native bone, while simultaneously promoting osteoblastic and vascular differentiation.