Lab-grown bones will save patients from having their own bone harvested if they need a graft
Nina Tandon is CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, a biotech company set up in 2012 to bio-engineer bone tissue
Lab-grown bones will save patients from having their own bone harvested if they need a graft
Nina Tandon is CEO and co-founder of EpiBone, a biotech company set up in 2012 to bio-engineer bone tissue replacements.
Why do we need to grow bones?
At the moment, the only way to get bone for grafts is to cut it out of a human. If you need a piece of bone for, say, your ankle, they’ll cut it out of your hip. There are several million of these bone-grafting procedures done every year worldwide. The idea is to grow bone from a patient’s own cells so they won’t need that second surgery and so the implanted bone won’t be immunologically rejected.
How would you do this?
First, we’ll take a CT scan to get the 3D structure of a patient’s bone and use a high-precision machine to carve a decellularised bovine bone into the required shape. Then we’ll take fat tissue from a patient and extract stem cells from it. We combine the stem cells with the piece of carved bone and put it into a bioreactor [a vessel that supports tissue growth outside of the body]. That’s where the magic happens – after three weeks in the bioreactor we have a piece of bone ready for implantation. We’re working in pigs at the moment but will use the same principle for humans.
Why pigs? Don’t these things usually start in mice?
Pigs are a good fit for the bone we’re working on. We wanted a strong proof of concept so chose the most difficult bone in the head – the temporomandibular joint for the jaw. Pigs are great because they’ve got a very similar sized head to humans and use the bone in a similar way, in a kind of circular chewing motion.
And, erm, what does your lab smell like?
Ha! No we don’t keep the pigs in the lab. They’re kept in a faci