Traumatic bone injuries are very common orthopedic conditions that often require advanced treatment. The Masquelet technique is an existing two-stage surgical method used to heal traumatic injuries and non-unions. Last year in the United States alone there were 500,000 bone graft procedures performed to heal and treat these traumatic bone injuries or defects. The majority of these grafting procedures are necessary due to the size of these defects. These defects are called critical size defects and are defined by defects that are too large to heal naturally or defects that are more than 2.5 times the radius of the bone. The crux of the Masqulet technique is the induction of a biological membrane that provides the proper environment for osteogenesis. There is a desire to use a tissue engineering approach to fabricate and culture these membranes in vitro to later be used as part of the Masquelet technique. A tissue engineering approach was taken to engineer these membranes using a fibrin hydrogel platform seeded with normal human lung fibroblasts or a co-culture of fibroblasts or human umbilical vein endothelial cells. Constructs were analyzed for axial and radial compaction, cell viability, and cell morphology at differing time points and under different culture media conditions. Viable, vascularized constructs were able to be reliably manufactured and cultured allowing for characterization of the system. Although this work is not exhaustive, it sheds some light on a possible tissue engineering approach to work in conjunction with the Masquelet technique. Future work will focus on exploring other properties of the fibrin constructs as well as characterizing constructs made of collagen, and a combination of collagen and fibrin.

Date: Wednesday, December 2, 2020
Time: 6:30 AM
Zoom: https://umich.zoom.us/j/92706362206
Chair: Dr. Jan Stegemann