Engineering Commons^™

Human Ipsc Tissue-Engineered Cartilage For Disease Modeling Of Skeletal Dysplasia-Causing Trpv4 Mutations, Amanda R. Dicks

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Cartilage is essential to joint development and function. However, there is a variety of cartilage diseases, ranging from developmental (e.g., skeletal dysplasias) to degenerative (e.g., arthritis), in which treatments and therapeutics are lacking. For example, specific point mutations in the ion channel transient receptor potential vanilloid 4 (TRPV4) prevent proper joint development, leading to mild brachyolmia and severe, neonatally lethal metatropic dysplasia. Tissue-engineered cartilage offers an opportunity to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of these cartilage diseases for the development of treatments. Human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) are an improved cell source option for cartilage tissue engineering given their minimal …

Understanding And Improving Adult Stem Cells For Cartilage Tissue Engineering, Dakota Katz

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Articular cartilage allows for near frictionless joint movement; however, when damaged the tissue has very little capacity for self-repair. Tissue engineering can be used to both repair damaged articular cartilage and as an in vitro model for joint disease. Commonly used cell sources for tissue engineering are adipose-derived and bone marrow-derived mesenchymal stem cells (ASCs and MSCs) because they can be patient matched, expand rapidly in culture, and have multipotent differentiation potential. However, donor-to-donor variability of differentiation potential can mask the results of in vitro experiments and ASCs and MSCs only retain their multipotency for a limited number of passages. …

The Role Of Obesity And Dietary Fatty Acid Content In Regulating Humeral Bone And Cartilage Homeostasis, Lauren Votava

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Objective: The goal of this study was to investigate the effects of different dietary fatty acids in the context of diet-induced obesity on bone and cartilage in the humerus. It is known that obesity increases the severity of injury-induced osteoarthritis in the knee, however it is not fully understood what pathological changes have occurred due to diet alone¹. Additionally, while it is known that shoulder osteoarthritis has a link to obesity, the alterations in this joint are incompletely described.

Methods: In order to examine diet-induced changes in both bone and cartilage, this research utilized mice that had been …