Regenerative Medicine
BioFrontiers is rejuvenating bodies damaged by injury, age, or disease.
Conventional treatments for damaged tissues only stabilize existing injured or deteriorated regions, but regenerative medicine aims to either block further degeneration or restore normal function. BioFrontiers focuses primarily on skeletal muscle, bone & cartilage, and the cardiovascular system because these are major clinical issues with few effective therapies. Moreover, heart and cartilage have extremely limited repair mechanisms, and the self-repair capacity of skeletal muscle and bone declines with age and is often insufficient upon extensive injury. We combine world-leading engineering expertise in biomaterials, 3D bioprinting, biofabrication, and advanced imaging with a deep understanding of stem cells and the natural processes governing tissue regeneration to create new regenerative therapies.Ìý
Regenerative Medicine Focus Areas
All Labs StudyingÌýRegenerative Medicine
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Anseth Lab
The Anseth Lab designs innovative biomaterials with programmed, tunable properties and are pioneers in stem cell and organoid technologies. Their engineered cell-material constructs have applications from understanding development and disease to tissue replacement and regeneration.
Belliveau Lab
The Belliveau Lab combines bioengineering, biophysics, cell biology, and genomics to uncover mechanisms of electric field-directed cell migration. They will develop new mechanistic insights into electrotaxis to answer biological questions relevant to cell motility and immune system function and to develop biomedical tools for regenerative medicine, immunoengineering, and cellular guidance.
Brumbaugh Lab
The Brumbaugh Lab investigates the molecular regulatory processes that allow one individual’s cells from different tissues to interpret the genome differently and confer different properties. They focus on how stem cells develop into specialized mature cells with the goal of harnessing them for regenerative medicine.
Bryant Lab
The Bryant Lab engineers 3D printed biomimetic and bioactive gels for tissue repair and regeneration with a special focus on solutions for cartilage loss or damage. They are aggressively pursuing cures for osteoarthritis through a synthesis of engineered materials, therapeutic cells, and novel drug delivery systems.
Burdick Lab
The Burdick Biomaterials and Biofabrication Lab designs new biomaterials and biofabrication technologies for lab-created microtissues that model health and disease and for clinical use. They are leaders in developing self-healing, injectable gels whose uses range from drug delivery to tissue patching, such as heart attack damage.
Calve Lab
The Calve Musculoskeletal ExtracellularÌý MatrixÌý Lab characterizes the material properties of assembling tissues to establish design parameters for regenerative therapies. They are particularly interested in the composition and spatial organization of the extracellular matrix, its influence on muscle mechanical properties, and the application of hyaluronic acid to muscle repair and regeneration.
Ferguson Lab
The Ferguson Biomechanics and Biomimetic Lab studies how the microstructure, composition, and material properties of tissues influence mechanical behavior. Further, they examine how these properties change with disrupted mechanical loading, aging, or disease.
Hill Lab
The Hill Lab studies how gut microbes impact the pancreas. Their research has implications for Type I Diabetes, pancreatic cancer, and fetal pancreas development. Their goal is to develop microbially-derived treatments to prevent or reverse disease.
Leinwand Lab
The Leinwand Lab are leaders in the molecular cardiology field. Their interdisciplinary studies close the gap between disease-causing mutations and the manifestations of heart disease. Moreover, they are pioneers in examining disease modifying factors such as biological sex, diet, exercise, and hormone status, and they specialize in detailed analyses of the motor protein myosin. Their discoveries underpinned the first ever approved drug for the genetic heart disease hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.
Olwin Lab
The Olwin Lab examines the mechanisms regulating the growth, differentiation and self-renewal of skeletal muscle stem cells (satellite cells) for eventual use in cell-based gene therapy approaches. They use molecular genetics, cell biology, and cellular biochemistry to understand satellite cell self-renewal and to investigate age-related decline and neuromuscular diseases.
Zeng Lab
The Zeng Lab investigates the causes of neuron death, especially in relation to aberrant RNA processing, in diseases such as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and frontotemporal dementia (FTD). They combine human genetics, RNA science, disease modeling, stem cell biology, and technology development across multiple scales with the goal of discovering interventions that could stop neurodegeneration and improve patient quality of life.
