3D human bone marrow stromal and endothelial cell spheres promote bone healing in an osteogenic niche

What is it about?

Due to an aging population exacerbated by increased obesity and diminished physical activity the incidence of bone fractures and disorders is sharply increasing globally. Over the years, the scientific community has produced unique technologies to replace bone with substitute artificial materials or with bone from patients or donors. Unfortunately, these bone replacements can often cause further problems when rejected by the patient's immune system and more importantly when it does not have an adequate blood supply to keep these large implants alive. To improve bone healing a functioning blood supply is very important to ensure the cells within the bone are well maintained and do not die. These blood vessel cells and bone cells are excellent at communicating with each other and the surrounding tissue environment to build new healthy bone in order to repair these bone disorders and fractures. Because of this crucial interaction we combined bone and blood vessel cells into a small constructs and looked at their ability to regenerate new bone when implanted into a small bone injury model. We analysed these injured bones by 3-dimensional x-rays and histology after a period of growth with the implanted cell constructs and found that the blood vessel cell group produced the best repair to the bone defects. We concluded that these results indicate that the cells interacted with the surrounding bone at the fracture site to encourage the natural healing process and that this information may lead to the development of new bone therapies in the future.

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