Engineering Commons^™

Bone Tissue Engineering: Scalability And Optimization Of Densified Collagen-Fibril Bone Graft Substitute Materials, John G. Nicholas, Lauren E. Watkins, Sherry L. Voytik-Harbin

The Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF) Symposium

Over 240 million people missing teeth worldwide experience lingering problems such as difficulty speaking and eating, undesirable aesthetics, and resorption of bone supporting neighboring teeth. The gold standard of treatment utilizes grafts to attach a function-restoring implant to supporting bone. Current graft materials suffer from problems including autologous donor site morbidity, long resorption time, incomplete integration with the maxillae or mandible, and structural weakness. Patient-specific, cellularized bone grafts may be a solution to these issues by accelerating and improving the quality of regenerated bone. Recently, encapsulation of mesenchymal stem cells within self-assembling type I collagen oligomer matrices has been shown …