Jerusalem: Oxygen-dependent bone tissue engineering

Research lead

Nadav Kimelman, from the Faculty of Dental Medicine at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, has developed a technique that accelerates bone regeneration. It relies on increasing oxygen availability in scaffolds. Kimelman, a doctoral student of Professor Dan Gazit, was awarded the Kaye Innovation Award for his work.

Successful healing of orthopaedic injuries and conditions, such as fractures and osteoporosis, depends on replacement of damaged tissues. This can be achieved using tissue engineering which requires an appropriate combination of cells, genes and scaffolds, and importantly oxygen, the lack of which prevents efficient tissue formation.

Kimelman showed that oxygen carrier-containing injectable scaffolds, combined with adult bone generating stem cells, increased and accelerated bone formation compared with scaffolds without oxygen carriers.

Increasing oxygen availability, says Kimelman, results in increased cell survival and improved tissue regeneration, and could be applied not only to orthopaedics but also to the development of novel therapeutic strategies in other medical fields such as cardiology and neurosurgery.